


_Nightcall

by glenarvon



Series: _Brilliancy [20]
Category: Watch Dogs (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Car Chases, Consensual Sex, Dark Clouds spoilers, F/M, Post-Game, Public Sex, Technobabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-03 18:16:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 35,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2860424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glenarvon/pseuds/glenarvon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two complicated people find (and lose) each other in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. _Nightcall No 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Author's Note:** Poppy fascinates me. Her character design is very unique, but her role is minor and we barely learn anything about her at all. I guess, at this point, that her story was cut content in some way. I'm holding out hope for her appearence in the sequel or a DLC.
> 
> For now, this is solely and exclusively my own interpretation of her character and her role in the game.
> 
>  **Additional Note:** I have great plans for this segment, but I'm not sure I can actually pull it off. I'm going to try and write Poppy and Aiden into a relationship, but they never really talk face to face (only about business or other life-and-death matters) but they really talk only on the phone at night. Maybe you recognise the mood of such calls.
> 
> Some of their exchanges will only hint at backstory and will leave gaps. I don't want to infodump. Important bits should be clear (or become clear as the story unfolds.)
> 
>  **Lastly,** it's no secret that I disdain almost all depictions of romantic love. It doesn't mean I don't acknowledge the feeling or that I reject all iterations of it. However, if you expect flowers and chocolate and dialogues going _I love you/I love you, too_ , you'll be greatly disappointed. I try to depict complex relationships, in this as in everything else I write. I'll let you be the judge of how well I do.

[this takes place in spring 2015, after the main events of the game] 

* * *

_"Chances are you dialed this number by mistake. If so, hang up now. If you’re trying to find me, you’re not going to, so hang up now. There won’t be a beep.”_

"Hello? Well, you know me as Poppy. I'm only calling because I've never had a chance to thank you properly after what you did. You saved many lives that night, including mine and I owe you. I've seen you on the news, I'm sure you save so many, it barely registers anymore, though I guess something must keep you going, too. So, before I start rambling, let me say it again: Thank you. And if there's ever anything I can do in return, I'm sure you'll know how to find me.

I thought you should know I've decided to work for Chicago PD. I know the scene, more intimately than I'd like, but perhaps something good will come of it in the end. I know who to talk to, who to lean on. The girls will talk with me when they'll never speak to a police officer. Someone has to help them, it might as well be me. At least I know what it's like.

Perhaps it's also a way to make amends, I'm not sure. I did a lot wrong in my life, maybe I can make up for it somehow. These women — and there are children and boys and grown men, too — they need someone to watch out for them who really understands what they are going through. I don't think I'm their saviour in some way, just one person, doing her best. I think that's all anyone can ask, isn't it?

But I do call for another reason, too. I didn't have time to realise it before. I'm sure you've noticed I wasn't at my best when we met and things moved very quickly, but now, with time, I think I've managed to put all the pieces in the right place. I didn't recognise you in the Infinite 92 and during the auction, but the more I think about it, the more certain I am. You _were_ at the Merlaut, two years ago, when Quinn was hacked.

It's possible you…"

_"Donna. I'm here."_

"You've been listening to me all this time?"

_"Making sure you check out. There was a trace on the call, your friends at CPD, no doubt. What do you mean, you remember me from the Merlaut?"_

"Two years ago. I was working with Iraq. He was hacking Quinn's network, looking for something he could use. It went badly. I never learned the details of what happened. There must have been a second hacker in the system at the same time and an alarm was triggered. Quinn put everythig he had on the trail and Iraq let me take the fall to make sure his involvement wasn't discovered. He pinned it on me and they sentenced me to… well, what you saw. Quinn wouldn't believe a word I said after Iraq was finished. I'm still not sure why they didn't kill me immediately. Some money to be made from a pretty face, I guess, while it was still pretty. Crispin would've taken care of that."

_"Only if he'd been very fast."_

"Because of the pocket knife? I never stood a chance, but I thought, well, maybe I can at least force him to kill me quickly. Don't think I don't know how lucky I am it never had to come to that."

_"There_ was _a second hacker at the Merlaut. You knew Iraq well?"_

"Not that well. Well enough to trust him more than I should have, perhaps. Iraq had plans. _Big_ plans. He wasn't just a mad dog, he had a brain in him. For a time, I thought maybe he could turn things around for the whole neighbourhood. I thought the entire gang-banger act was just to win respect. You can't change that place from the bottom, you'll have to do it when you're on top. I thought in the end, he'd break the cycle, make things better."

_"I doubt he was on the way to do that."_

"Yes, it doesn't look so good now, in hindsight. But he had the means, he could've been one of the good ones. But look at Rossi-Fremont. It's like ten years ago, like it was before Iraq. All the same cycle of violence and poverty and more violence."

_"Iraq put it outside the system. At least people are connected again."_

"But there's still no real hope. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Where it's all going to go? ctOS is supposed to sort out those sorts of places, but it can't can it? Because it's only about people and people make mistakes, or they're greedy or stupid, or just too desperate to realise what's right in front of them. It doesn't really matter if it's Iraq or somebody else."

_"You want to make a difference."_

"I could probably say the same thing to you. But there's a large gap between _wanting to_ make a difference and really changing things for the better. I'm sure of what I do, but that's now, that's with the memories for Quinn's auction and my time at the Infinite 92 still fresh in my mind. What if, years down the line, I look back and Rossi-Fremont and all the other places that are _exactly like_ Rossi-Fremont are still unchanged? I'll look back and I'll realise I changed nothing. I think that's what I'm heading for: Embitterment."

_"That's not a good way to think."_

"It's the realistic way to think. What keeps _you_ going?"

_"That's a hard question."_

"Yes."

_"It's also going to be a hard answer and you may not like it. The truth is complicated."_

"Isn't it always? I'm difficult to shock."

_"Another time, perhaps. Listen, there may be something you can help me with, if you were serious?"_

"I've been through too much to go back on my word. And I _really_ have been through too much to be easily scared by anything. If you need my help, I'll be there, no holding back. It's the least I can do."

_"Even if I put you back in the line of fire?"_

"That's the point, isn't it?"

_"Well, yes. Your employers won't like it if you work with me."_

"Would you be surprised to learn CPD isn't all negative about the vigilante's presence on the streets? It's a mixed bag, of course, and the official line is something else again, but so far, you do more good than harm and enough of them realise that. It doesn't mean they wouldn't arrest you if they had the chance. And _are_ a cop-killer, too. That doesn't go over well.

But, now that my life is my own again, I'll do with it what I like. If I decide to help you, it's none of their business. They don't need to know about everything I do. And I'm sure you have some tricks to help cover your tracks."

_"A few, perhaps. I'll get back to you."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think Aiden's phone doesn't actually take messages, but for the sake of this story, let's imagine it does. I'm sure fanfic authors have altered canon in worse ways than this. Also, let's also imagine Aiden made sure Poppy could contact him in some way.
> 
> * * *
> 
> _**Revised** on 05/June/2015 and 01/June/2016_


	2. _Nightcall: Indigo State

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aiden enlists Poppy's help with a job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing much happens in this part. And that's not a cliffhanger at the end, either. I'm so sorry.

[takes place in spring 2015]

* * *

_"You called. Something wrong?"_

"That depends. I heard a strange rumour. It said Nicholas Crispin is back in Chicago. I'm surprised his death isn't common knowledge."

_"There was a lot of chaos, before and after the cops raided the auction. I_ 'heard' _Crispin has gone into hiding, keeping his head down. Many of the buyers and sellers are doing it. Small fry, mostly."_

"You've been spreading the rumours! Why would you keep him alive?"

_"I can use him."_

* * *

**To:** Donna Dean

**From:** [unknown]

**Message:** _need help, picking you up, 10:30 tonight, wear something nice._

* * *

The thought that _Aiden Pearce_ of all people was just asking her out on a date with characteristic aplomb amused her throughout the evening, picking out a dress and painting her face. It made her smile, even though she knew well enough it wasn't anything like that. 

Punctual to the second, a dark magnate drew to a halt across the street, parked in the gap of darkness between two street lights and Donna stalked over on too high heels, little clicking noises on the rough concrete.

She settled in the backseat of the magnate. She gave Pearce a wan smile from the side and said, "Something nice? Why are we playing dress-up?"

"Because we're going to do this the old-fashioned way," Pearce said, himself lodged on the other side, face hidden in the shadow of a fedora and the upturned collar of his dark coat. "Or you are, I'm just backup."

The car picked up speed right from the start, shooting down the road aggressively. She didn't know who the driver was, but if Pearce trusted him, she had no issues with him.

"Clue me in?" she asked.

"We're going to a club called Indigo State. It used to be mob-owned, but since Lucky's death the Club's struggling to keep all their assets under control. Indigo State _seems_ to be under independent ownership, but I couldn't trace where the money was coming from, or where it goes. The manager, guy called Haugh, he's a paranoid technophobe."

"Can't really blame him," she mused.

"His computers aren't networked to ctOS and they don't have any wifi capabilities. Haugh's strict about his staff's phones, doesn't want them around. Long story short, I can't get in without getting in."

"You think there's something fishy going on?"

"No, I _know_ there's something fishy going on. The nightclub is a front, or possibly a lucrative side-investment. Half the criminal underworld of the Midwest frequents the place, yet CPD doesn't even keep it under observation."

Chicago PD was her employer. Working with Pearce at all put whatever future she was building there in jeopardy, but it didn't feel like that. To her, as well as many she spoke to, Pearce and the law were on the same side, except _he_ didn't have to respect people and property that didn't need to be respected. But then, all of that could just as easily be a nice fairy tale. The truth was, neither she nor anyone else, really knew what he was about.

"You think they've been bought off?" she asked.

"Maybe, but I barely got wind of all of this," he shrugged slightly. "It's possible CPD really doesn't even know. They depend on ctOS just as much as everyone else and Indigo does a good job at keeping itself under wraps."

"What _do_ you know?"

"Not enough, I don't even know what's in that basement. Could be a brothel, could be gambling, could be drugs or guns or secrets. It could even be something legit, but I find that hard to believe."

She looked away from him and outside. They were dipping into Mad Mile, lights flashing past in all colours, blinding her momentarily, pulling her along with the buzz.

"Why do you need me?" she asked.

"Two reasons. One, I know your skill-set, you can do this. Two, I got an exit strategy just for you."

She looked back at him when she heard him move. He pulled a small bundle from his side and handed it to her.

She put it on her lap and folded it open. Fine tools and tiny devises resting on dark cloth like diamonds. Bugs, clearly nothing you'd get on the open market judging by their size and she could only guess at their sophistication.

"You have to plant at least one of them close enough to one of the Indigo's computers," Pearce explained. "Not the ones on the ground floor, they are on a separate network, nothing important on those. You'll have to get upstairs to the office. Their range is good, if you drop them behind a computer, they'll work. Ideally, you get them inside the case. One will do, more for contingency. It'll give me wifi access to the network."

She folded the bundle up again carefully. It was small enough to fit into her bag without bulging it out too much.

"And the exit strategy?"

"Since Haugh's so paranoid, it's unlikely you won't be noticed. If you are, keep calm and get them to call me."

Faint amusement came into his voice, "Or rather, let them call Crispin."

"It's been months since the Crispin rumour started," she said. "You've been planning this for so long?"

The amusement still lingered in his voice. Part of her wished she could see more of his face to be certain of it.

He said, "Not this specifically. But it's a name the right kind of people will recognise. At the same time, his death is surrounded by too much confusion to be sure it really happened. No one left who could clear things up, at least as long as I keep it on the down-low."

He seemed to consider for a moment, then added, "Do you think people will recognise you?"

"Possible, I don't know," she shook her head. "But I can play the part, no problem."

She leaned back in her seat, took a long look at him in the dark car. "Is there a reason why you don't sneak in yourself?"

"I ran background checks on Haugh's staff, too many who know my face, too risky and I don't want to tip Haugh off that his security was breached at all. I show up there, it'll just rock the boat unnecessarily."

He pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped something on it. She watched his fingers move, momentarily mesmerised at the speed. Her own phone buzzed in her bag and she startled.

Without looking at her, he said, "I've uploaded floor-plans to your phone, I've updated the original plans with what I could find out about the place, but it's probably not a 100% accurate, but it should give you an idea where to go."

She was not privy to his goals, she barely knew him, she had spoken to him only twice on the phone after meeting him. She didn't know what he wanted, not in the long run. She didn't know what he could do at all. After the ctOS blackout of 2013, everyone knew the vigilante was, at least, a hacker with some access, though just how far or how deep nobody knew and Blume certainly wasn't telling anyone. Personally, after the short time she had ever known him, there wasn't much she would put past him.

She looked at the new files on her phone and didn't question why her firewall hadn't stood up to him for even a second. It just didn't seem to be worth worrying about.

"What's different today?"

"It's short notice, I know," he said, though if it was supposed to be an apology, it barely came across as one. "Some Hollywood people are here, they are thinking about using the club to shoot film scenes. They were scheduled for next weekend but the visit was moved forward. It's a good opportunity, they'll distract Haugh and his security for you."

The Indigo State was housed in a modern building, expensive glass walls, catching and amplifying the blue lights shining up from the ground. A long line of people was queueing outside under the watchful eye of several bouncers.

"You're on the list," Pearce said when the magnate rolled to a halt across from the entrance.

She only nodded and got out of the car. She was feeling tense and she didn't want him to notice. It wasn't the first time she had been back in a nightclub, Chicago PD had put her in several such places, though most hadn't had the pompous front the Indigo State sported. It wasn't any indicator of legality at any rate. A good front was often just as good as keeping your location secret.

As she stepped into the Indigo State, the music rolled against her, laced with pretentious laughter and the air was heavy with perfume and faint traces of sweat and alcohol. It was a stylish crowd, dancing under a faked starry sky. Perhaps this was less sinister than the Infinite 92, but she could almost sense the dark secrets right underneath her feet. She spotted the men within the crowd who didn't quite belong, who came and went through a cordoned-off door and a narrow stairwell visible behind it.

Pearce was right. Something more went on in this place than met the eye.

* * *

The rhythmic beat of the music from the dance-floor below chased her still, reminded her of just how short her timeframe was. Haugh's visitors from Hollywood had created a stir, had drawn people from the crowd who recognised them and security had had to move fast to prevent a scene, enough for her to slip away undetected and find herself on the upper floor and in the largest of several offices. 

She couldn't quite decide if Haugh was just out of it or whether he was one of the sane ones. ctOS' complete and utter outage — not to mention its city-wide malfunction before that — could put a more balanced man on edge. Perhaps rejecting all this new tech wasn't just for the paranoid and stupid anymore. It certainly created more work for everyone.

The tiny screwdriver hummed quietly to itself as she unscrewed the casing of Haugh's laptop, put the bug inside. Ironically, Haugh's 'no network' policy probably meant he had nothing _else_ configured at all. Not even a firewall, even if Pearce apparently barely acknowledged their existence.

She screwed the case closed, dropped the screwdriver back into her purse and rearranged the computer back on the desk in its rightful place. Haugh would never know until it was too late, would never…

The door opened and Donna didn't even have time to drop like a stone behind the desk. Damn the music. She should have heard someone come. This is what she got for gloating about Haugh's stupidity, she thought.

She threw up her hands and took a step back.

"I'm sorry!" she announced, making her voice a little shriller than it should be. At this point, her best bet was to play dumb. It made people feel superior and she didn't seem like much of a threat anymore.

"I got lost!" she added for good measure.

The man in the door wore a dark suit, house security then, frowning at her from across the room. He wasn't buying that, either.

"Looking for what?" he demanded.

"A private place!" she babbled, stepping around the desk. "I wanted to do a line of coke! And I heard you didn't like that in this place and I didn't want to do it in the restroom…"

He didn't seem to be buying it. In fact, he took a step back and gave the lock on the door a critical look while carefully keeping her in his line of sight.

"Door was locked," he said. "Stop bullshitting me."

On the up-side, he wasn't going for his gun. Girls in high-heels and short dresses rarely seemed dangerous. Until you got a heel in your privates, that was, but if she tried, her entire story would fall apart.

"It wasn't locked!" she declared. "I… I'm sorry, I don't want any trouble."

He was obviously done listening to her story, she could see it in his face, clear as day. He put a hand to his earpiece and pointed with an outstretched arm, "Sit down there and shut up! No dumb moves!"

To his colleague, he said, "Get the boss, I found something in his office that doesn't belong."

Donna did as she was told, demurely clutching her bag in her lap and giving the bouncer her best imitation of confused innocence, but if it was working on him in any way, he was too professional to show it.

Not much later, he stepped aside to allow his boss inside and two other security.

Haugh was a tall man, badly combining a scrawny built with a flabby potbelly. He had wrapped both these things in an expensive designer suit that gave him some semblance of poise, sitting behind his desk and watching her with a kind of puzzled anger. He looked past Donna at his henchmen.

Haugh said, "What do you think? Cop? South Club? Fixer? Looks a bit too classy to be Viceroy."

Even without any — known — criminal affiliation, Haugh obviously knew how the game was being played. He couldn't hold his position if he was this weak-willed. And he was potentially at war with all of these groups, at least if Pearce's information was good and Haugh had independent backers.

"You've got it all wrong!" Donna tried again, playing her role for all it was worth.

"Wrong, eh?" he asked through a grin of startlingly white teeth. "You were snooping around in my office."

She swallowed dry, trying to clear her throat. "No, I got lost, okay? I was… I was looking for a quiet place. Do a line of coke. I know you don't approve, I didn't want to get into any trouble."

Haugh seemed unconvinced. She couldn't blame him, perhaps the story could have used a little more work, but usually in such matters, simple things worked best.

"Where is the coke?"

She shrugged, helplessly. "Well, I was already done when your thug showed up and scared me half to death." She opened her eyes wide. "Please don't hurt me."

"What were you doing in here?" he asked as if their previous exchange hadn't happened. Haugh seemed to have himself convinced she wasn't what she seemed and she couldn't decide if she should congratulate him on his intuition or not.

She bit down on her lip, not just playing anymore. If Haugh slipped her control completely, if he never believed her well enough to make the call…

"I can prove it," she said, voice carefully pitched to waver a little between fear and conviction. "Do you have a phone? Call and ask for Nicholas Crispin, I'm his… girl."

Haugh hesitated. She had no idea just how much the name meant to him. From what she knew, Haugh had been one of the second tier bosses who swam to the top in the gap created when Quinn's auction was curb-stomped a year before.

"Should I know that name?"

"Hey, boss, sounds familiar," said one of Haugh's henchmen. "He's, like, stinking rich, knew this guy, who worked…"

Haugh waved him into silence impatiently. "I know who he is, idiot," he snapped. He looked at Donna. "Everyone can throw around a big name to save their hide. It's not terribly believable, either. Crispin's dead."

"Keeping a low profile _,"_ she corrected, raising her voice a little. "It was so _terrible._ Cops all over the place and bodies piling up? It just seemed like a good time to go on holiday."

She could practically see the thoughts work behind Haugh's eyes, assessing her and the situation. Did she act spooked enough to be Crispin's girl? Or _too_ spooked _?_ She had no idea what lie would help and which would make it worse.

Haugh looked at his henchman again. "Give me your phone."

The henchmen sprang into action and handed it over.

"Number?"

She told him and after he'd dialled, he put the phone between them, its ringing bounced around the room in the tense silence.

It took forever, at least that's what it felt like to her. Long enough, in fact, for her to wonder if Pearce hadn't abandoned her for some reason. He had enough enemies, perhaps he'd ran afoul of one of them and now couldn't hold up his end of the plan. She looked away from the phone and at Haugh, wondering what he would do if her story fell through. He couldn't know about the bug and he had yet to search her bag. If he did, however…

She let her gaze wander from Haugh to his henchmen, gauging her chances to slip past them. It didn't look good. Chicago PD had given her some training, but she didn't fool herself into thinking she stood a chance against three men like that.

_"Who is this?"_

Haugh said, "I'm calling from the club Indigo State, am I speaking with Mr. Crispin?"

There was a long pause, far too long for her comfort, but she had been spared ever meeting Crispin, she had no idea what to think of him. The question was, was Pearce any better informed? Was Haugh?

_"Who's asking?"_

"I'm Haugh, I'm the manager of this establishment. We had some trouble with a girl. She gave me this number."

Another long pause. _"Poppy? It's her night off."_

"Well, she has a few strange ideas of what to do with it," Haugh remarked. "We are holding her for you."

_"Good,"_ the voice on the other end of the line grew darker. _"Not a scratch on her."_

She had never heard anyone put as much sinister implication in just one line. She played her part, looking worried down on her hands clasped in her lap. At least, in this way, the men around her had less of her expression to read, less to interpret in this way or that.

Haugh took the phone and handed it back to his henchman. He looked back at Donna.

"Nicholas Crispin," Haugh mused. "No one really left who can tell what happened at the auction. Most security dead, most buyers in jail, girls scattered everywhere. Everyone trying to keep their heads down, especially with Lucky Quinn biting the bullet not much later. Tell me, Poppy, is he really such a monster?"

She glanced up at him, past her eyelashes. "Do you know him?"

Because he was obviously probing her and she'd rather have it out of the way.

"We never had the pleasure," Haugh said, a little tartly. She guessed he simply hadn't been up high enough in the pecking order to move in the same circles as Crispin.

"One of you know the man?" Haugh asked his henchmen, then looked at Donna, searching her face for a reaction. "We wouldn't want to hand you over to just _anyone,_ would we?"

* * *

Rain had left a glittering sheen on the cracked asphalt street, reflecting the long rows of streetlights and the gaudier lights from the Indigo State's front. Although there was not much traffic, cars went by at an irregular interval, some obviously looking for an open parking spot along the street. People came and went from the Indigo State, the line as long as it had been when the night began. 

Two bouncers held sway over the comings and goings with polite, unobtrusive menace just because they were both very big guys. They had noticed the dark magnate as it stopped a little down the road, just outside the immediate spill of the bright blue lights of the club. It parked there for a long minute with nothing happening, its tinted windows keeping whatever was inside, hidden.

Dark cars parked just off from your front door tended not to be a good sign, the bouncers edged closer together, exchanging looks, wondering if this fell within their responsibilities or not.

Their problems were solved when their boss pushed his way past them from inside the club. Haugh seemed just a little bit livid.

"Getting called down," he muttered with an angry glance at Donna as if it was her fault, which, of course, it was.

'Crispin' had called the henchman whose phone Haugh had used earlier, announcing he was at the Indigo and expected delivery of his property promptly. Haugh had tried arguing, but had been shot down so harshly, Donna could practically see him regret putting the phone on speaker again.

As their little group approached the magnate, the driver got out, hurried around the car and just about managed to open the door for his passenger when they arrived.

The street had become oddly deserted since the magnate had stopped. No passing cars and their harsh, revealing headlights and it was a good trick, keeping well away from what was potentially a well lit room in which Haugh had all the opportunity he needed to actually _recognise_ the man he was most certainly _not_ expecting. And Aiden Pearce's face had been plastered across every screen in the city for months.

Not that too much of his face was visible just now, even without the trickery. Collar up and a dark shawl around his throat, obscuring the line of his jaw and the shadow of the fedora covering everything but the mouth. He stepped clear of the car and the driver withdrew a subservient step. Pearce leaned against the back of the car, crossed his arms over his chest and studied them from the beneath the fedora in slow-burning silence.

It was a good show, Donna decided, after she'd stolen a quick glance at Haugh and caught him looking much less sure of himself out here and facing this rather imposing stranger. Who, just to make Haugh even more nervous, made absolutely no attempt to speak first.

The moment broke when Haugh's wounded pride kicked back in, he remembered that his men were watching him and that he was on his home turf.

"Mr. Crispin, I presume?" Haugh asked.

'Crispin' inclined his head slightly and didn't respond to the question. "What trouble?" he asked instead with careful emphasis on each word.

"Your girl," Haugh said with some disdain. "Has been snooping around in my office. When we caught her she told us a stupid story. Really, insults my intelligence and all."

"What there is of it," 'Crispin' said lowly, but didn't give Haugh time to bristle at the slight. "I'm sure she just got lost. It happens. Sometimes."

'Crispin' pushed himself from the car, dropped his hands into the pockets of the weathered leather coat he was wearing. It made Haugh's men twitch and startle, Donna could feel them just behind her, unsure whether they should react or not. 'Crispin' noticed and stopped for a brief moment until they relaxed again.

He tilted his head a little, just enough to convey a certain _curiosity._

He pulled one hand free from the pocket and held a rolled-up bundle of money out.

"Let's make this go away," he said dully. He took a step towards Haugh, close enough to offer the money and out of the shadow. A streetlamp's light slipped around the fedora as he moved and the angle changed.

And the street lights went out, easy as turning a switch in your living room. Haugh and his men shuffled, glancing up and down the street, then back at the still well-lit club and the lights still shining from windows along the street.

"That's not a blackout," one of Haugh's men observed, rather unnecessarily.

"Fucking ctOS," another muttered.

'Crispin' hadn't retracted his arm when the lights went down, he'd simply stopped, suddenly reduced to a distantly lit, black outline against metal-grey darkness.

Haugh, finally, to assuage Donna's fraying nerves, seemed to buy into the act. Or perhaps he had been looking at the money when he probably _should_ have been looking at who offered it, while it had been bright enough to see. If today's luck held for another minute or so, Haugh would never even know his mistake.

Haugh took the money. "All right," he said. "Your girl was never here."

He glanced over his shoulder and one of the henchmen gave her a shove, not too rough under her presumed owner's critical gaze. It still nearly made her stumble, she had grown stiff in her tension and her flimsy dress wasn't doing much against the leeched late-night cold crawling over the asphalt. Her heels clicked loudly as she walked the few steps toward 'Crispin'. He took the other hand out of his pocket and wrapped it around her waist, letting it rest heavy and possessively low on her hip for a moment.

"Get in the car," he growled.

Before she had time to even contemplate the warning in his tone — more than playacting, this — the driver came forward and opened the door. He put a hand to her upper arm and helped her gently along as she scrambled into the car. She scooted to the opposite seat, watched as the door was thrown closed and the driver hurried around to get behind the wheel.

"On the other hand," Haugh was saying on the dark street outside the luxury car. "I definitely remember seeing you here, Mr. Crispin."

'Crispin' took his time, let the silence grow heavy and stifling, smog drawing all the oxygen from the air. Then he turned away, quite deliberately, not bothering to speak to Haugh's face.

"We're done here," he said, gloved hand already on the handle, Donna already heard its quiet click.

"Mr. _Crispin,"_ Haugh raised his voice and the street was so empty, Donna thought she could hear something like an echo.

"I'm absolutely sure," Haugh continued, a new sneer in his voice. "It'd be a shame if the wrong people heard you were back in Chicago."

Pearce let go of the door again, turn around and for the first time since the charade had begun, with anything other than measured menace. Instead, he took three, quick long strides that brought him close to Haugh, playing the darkness for all it was worth.

Even from where she sat, bad angle and worse lighting and all, she saw Haugh flinch before he could stop himself. It created a little shockwave through his men, once again unsure if they were required to interfere.

"I _said,_ " 'Crispin' rasped. "We are done."

And Haugh yielded, out of a sense that his dignity couldn't be saved if he kept pressing because 'Crispin' had turned out to be exactly the kind of intimidating motherfucker people always assumed. Donna wouldn't be surprised if Haugh found a more weasely way to make use of this, but Pearce would have his finger right on his pulse by then.

Come to think of it, maybe it'd even stir Haugh up a bit. For someone who professed squeaky-cleanness, he sure didn't have qualms trying to apply blackmail.

Donna finally allowed herself to curl up in her seat when the magnate started moving, it's motion silent and smooth, as befit a car this expensive.

"You okay?" Pearce asked eyeing her from the side. He'd let his collar drop and pushed the fedora back far enough to allow _some_ view of his face, especially as the street lamps flickered back on, some of them taking a little longer than others.

"Yeah, fine," she said. "It all went according to plan. I got one bug into Haugh's laptop and dropped a few others in his office when no one was looking. But I'm not sure if they're close enough to anything."

"Easy way to find out," Pearce said with a smile. He briefly looked away from her and scanned the houses rushing past. He pulled his phone from the coat and quickly tapped it twice. Just in time, as it turned out, for road blocks to retract at the end of the road. A line of cars had formed on the other side.

He kept his attention fixed on the phone and when he said nothing for long minutes, Donna finally put a hand on the seat between them and leaned over to look at the screen from the side. He shuffled a little, looked at her. "Oh, sorry," he muttered and angled the phone toward her.

But he was going too fast through the data for her to make much sense of. She spotted something that looked like calendars, spreadsheets of numbers, but gone too quickly to read.

"I was almost expecting there's just Haugh's unpublished novel of vampire unicorns," Donna said. "He's crazy enough for that sort of thing."

"No," Pearce said earnestly. "He's running a market downstairs."

"A market?"

"Quinn had blackmail on Blume, kept them leashed, but Quinn's dead and the blackmail is all public. Until they find a new arrangement, off the grid is fashionable in the criminal underworld. That's what the Indigo State is. A ctOS proof marketplace."

"How big is this?"

"Not sure, can't tell from this. It can't have been operational for long, but it looks like it's good business for Haugh and whoever cooked up the idea in the first place."

She pulled her gaze away from the phone to study his face. "You could take this to the police. Leak it, gives them enough reason to raid the place."

"They'll just shut it down," he said. "And the backers will just set up shop elsewhere. No, cops can't move on this."

She wasn't sure what she heard in his voice, but it was unpleasant and rough, a side of him she hadn't seen before, only suspected. It almost looked like greed in the darkness, an eagerness to have this to himself and not trust someone else with it.

Perhaps she should argue the point, or even ignore him and tip the cops off herself. She could just claim she'd stumbled over the Indigo State by accident. She had enough pull to get things moving in the right direction. But then, Pearce had a point, too. A place like that was just one node in a far larger web. It would require careful planning to take down all — or at least most — of it.

Before she had the chance to make up her mind, the driver said, "Pearce, I think we're being followed."

Rather than lower the phone, Pearce swiped the screen and replaced Haugh's files with some kind of custom interface.

"We are," Pearce confirmed after a moment.

"Haugh?" Donna asked, though it didn't seem likely. Haugh hadn't had enough time to prepare something like that.

"I don't know," Pearce said. He looked up and around, scanned the cars outside. "If it is, he's better than I thought."

"What should I do?" the driver asked. "Try to shake them?"

"No, stop the car," Pearce said. "You did your part. I'll drive."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _**Revised** on 05/June/2015 and 01/June/2016_


	3. _Nightcall: Bad Faith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Poppy is forced to serve as bait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Allison Paxton's story was originally part of its own oneshot and a concept I've been wanting to do right from the start. What Aiden does has to have consequences, even if he's usually too much of a hypocrite to acknowledge it.
> 
> Also **note:** Poppy's reasoning _is_ a bit skewed.
> 
> **Warning:** Deals with some unpleasant things and it causes some emotional whiplashing. Life can be cruel like that.

[takes place in early spring 2015]

* * *

_"What's up?"_

"… can you come?"

_"Something wrong?"_

"You could say that."

_"On my way."_

* * *

Fear was a curious emotion, she had spent nearly a year with it until she had barely noticed it was there anymore. The human mind made its arrangements with such things and even found a kind of peace with its ultimate fate. She had had convinced herself that part of her life was done, when the cops came and Quinn's auction blew up in his face. When the cops offered her to clear her record if she worked for them.

That wasn't to say her life was never in danger or that it slipped her control every so often. No one, ever, was always in control and trying to achieve it was a sure way to drive yourself mad. But she'd had it covered, her life was her own and she used the line like a mantra every time she found herself in a place she didn't want to be.

But perhaps, at the end of it, her confidence was still fragile. The Infinite 92 had done too much damage for it to heal quickly, perhaps it never would and the best she could hope for was scar tissue in her mind.

So she feared. Many things in the world, more than she was willing to admit and she supposed she was in good company with the majority of people on the planet, struggling with their own tragedies. But there was also _this,_ a gun in her face and the concept of fear was less of an abstract, less even than it had been waiting for Crispin and clutching a knife she knew was too short to puncture his heart.

The woman on the other end of the gun watched her with wary attention. She'd waited for Donna outside her apartment and jumped her, overpowered her so smoothly and quickly, Donna suspected the woman had some training. She'd dragged her into her home and forced her down on her couch before Donna even knew what was happening.

She'd thrust Donna's phone into her face alongside her gun, yelled at her to call the vigilante and since sat glowering across from Donna, gun loosely in her hand, but her body retained too much tension for Donna to risk anything. This woman knew what she was doing, or at least she _thought_ she did.

"Why…?" Donna began, but her voice had gone too faint. She cleared her throat and the woman startled, gave her a warning look.

"What do you want?" Donna asked.

The woman said nothing, just stared at Donna for the longest time, then looked down at her gun for just as long, it seemed almost as if she was surprised to see it there.

"I was a soldier," the woman said. "I was at war. Afghanistan. It's hard to say I liked it, because that makes me sound like I'm crazy, but it's ironic, I think, because it turns out that's not where the danger was. I came back home and I met the most perfect man you can imagine..."

She was barely speaking to Donna, more to herself and her narrative didn't need to make sense to anyone else. While she spoke, her gaze wandered away from Donna, only to snap back at the slightest movement.

She frowned. "So, what are you?" she asked, dropping her story and with it, any hint of warmth was gone from her voice. Instead, it was laced with contempt.

"I don't know what you want with me," Donna said tonelessly.

"Your _friend,_ he took something from me and I don't think he even knows," the woman said. "Or cares. Because I learned that, too. In the war. Sometimes people snap, they go mad with bloodlust."

"My friend," Donna echoed. "Pearce?"

"He's a hard man to keep up with. You're much easier to follow."

She put her head to the side and her expression softened for no more than a second. "I'm sorry I had to involve you, but I can't find him, so I think it's prudent I make him come to me instead."

Donna considered, she forced herself to look away from the gun and into the woman's eyes instead. "You met the most perfect man… and?" she prompted so gently, the woman didn't seem to realise it.

"We married. I left the army and I opened a gym. Taught self-defence. Still do, but I don't have the time anymore. No, it's more like, why should I even bother? It's weird, I can't work up the energy for these people and their weaknesses. I remember it mattered, but… now it's hard to think sometimes."

She had only switched on one light and it was off to the side, not enough to see her clearly unless she turned her head toward it. The light outlined her poise on Donna's kitchen chair, the way she held the gun. A soldier, she'd said, it made sense, but her story was still disjointed and she didn't seem to care to make it more coherent.

"You look tired," Donna said and the woman gave a hard smile.

"It's tough work. I can't sleep anyway," she said and shrugged. "Might as well be roaming the streets, you never know who you'll stumble across, after all. I got lucky, you know. I spotted you the other night outside the Indigo State and I recognised you."

"From where?"

"The news. You were in a picture with a few cops and other whores. I did some digging and once I had a name, all I needed was a favour from a friend at the DMV. Could've been easier, but I'm no hacker, ctOS doesn't play so nice with me."

Donna shifted in her seat, trying to relax cramped muscles, but it didn't do much good. Her position wasn't her problem. Being held at gunpoint in her own home was.

"You'd better know what you're doing," she said. "Because I really don't. What's going to happen? Pearce shows up, you kill him and then what? You go back to your perfect husband and your perfect gym?"

The woman smiled again, unpleasantly. "You think it's the first time I've killed?"

"I think it's the first time like this," Donna said.

"Of course _you_ know what you're talking about," the woman sneered.

Despite herself, Donna felt her thoughts wander. She was trying to talk the woman out of whatever it was she wanted to do, without even knowing what had prompted it, but the direction of her own words brought bitter memories of her own and she wasn't sure she could face it. She'd take the gun over it any day.

"I don't have to explain myself to you," Donna said. "You broke into my house, you punched me in the face and you're holding a gun to it now."

"It's not personal," the woman said dismissively.

"Well, _fuck it,"_ Donna hissed with a quick surge of vitriol. "My home, my face. If that's not personal, I don't know what is."

"Pick your friends better next time," the woman said. "He isn't exactly rushing to your rescue, either."

Donna kept her gaze fixed on her, roused by her own memories and so vastly out of patience with being told what to do, she said, "Good question, isn't it? What if you got everything wrong and Pearce doesn't show. What happens to me? Will you murder me in cold blood?"

"Collateral damage, it can't always be avoided."

"So that's a yes," Donna said, edged forward in her seat. "You'll kill me. Tell me why I should sit still for that."

The woman immediately tensed, straightened and raised the gun from it's more casual angle. "Don't do anything stupid," she warned.

Donna kept pushing herself forward. The entire length of the room was between them, a couch table and in a straight line, she'd tangle with a stool, too, before she was even close to the woman. More than enough time to fire that gun, even for someone untrained. But Donna decided she had started on the course, she had to finish it now, had to push until something gave.

"What do I have to lose?" Donna asked through clenched teeth. Her heart was trying to beat itself out of her chest. "You'll kill me anyway."

"Sit back down," the woman ordered, but Donna folded her fingers around the arm of the couch, for whatever additional leverage it gave her. She had thrown away any element of surprise and she was done being patient with this madwoman. She'd never done submission well, before the Infinite 92 and she'd only learned how to pick her battles, _act_ submissive just to stay unhurt. It'd never been the real thing and now it was too late to learn the lesson.

And from the moment of stillness, everything happened at the same time. Donna leapt from her seat, launched herself forward with what strength she had. Later, she would realise that there were _two_ shots, from different guns with different bangs and the low hissing of plaster from the side. But in that instant, she only saw the woman's gun and the spark at its muzzle as it fired. Her foot snagged on the stool and she ignored it, kept going for the woman, who threw herself down and kicked at Donna.

The gun fell from her bloodied hand and Donna wasted no time wondering why there would be blood at all. The woman tangled her legs with Donna's and twisted, tore her from her already precarious balance and made her fall face first into the carpet. Desperately, Donna groped for the woman's gun because it was the only thing that would tip this fight in her favour. She didn't get very far. An elbow came down on her neck and Donna felt herself slump, momentarily disoriented and her body going limp.

She heard something shatter behind her and before she'd blinked her vision clear, a hand settled on her shoulder and yanked her up and across the floor, out of the way. Blindly, she struggled against the grip, but it was gone again immediately and it left her sitting on the floor in the pieces of the stool that had broken her stride before.

Aiden Pearce ignored her, bore down on her hostage-taker before the woman had fully recovered. It was a short struggle, both of them moving fast and precise, but the woman had all the disadvantages, already downed and wounded as she was. Donna saw the solid length of the baton, crashing in quick succession, into the woman's leg and then the side of her neck.

Pearce stepped clear of her and she crumpled to the ground. He picked up her gun before he stepped away and finally looked down at Donna with an almost thoughtful expression. He picked her up and half-carried her back to the couch.

She slipped down on it and things slowly began to register.

"Sorry about the wall," he said. "And the door."

He returned to the woman, pulled something from his pocket which Donna somewhat belatedly recognised as zip-ties.

Looking away from him, she saw the torn hole in the wall, roughly on level with where the woman's arm had been before. The lock on her door was kicked in, the door hanging ajar. The hallway beyond was in darkness, but it could only be a few more moments before her neighbours appeared.

"Anytime," she said.

Out of nowhere, the pain hit, throbbing in her head and her torso felt as if it was on fire. It took her a long moment to even place the pain. Slowly, she reached around and felt along the edges of her torn shirt, for the wound in her side. Blood had soaked into her shirt.

"I've been shot," she said quietly.

Pearce glanced at the door and hesitated before he walked over to her. He sat down at the edge of the couch, his coat spilled down the side, long enough to touch the floor.

"Let me see," he said, pulled the scarf from his face.

She raised her arm and hissed at the pain the movement caused. She reached for the shirt with her other hand, eyes carefully trained on some spot in midair in front of her. It didn't hurt bad enough, she told herself, and it was hardly the first time she had seen blood, even her own. Perhaps credibility with CPD had mellowed her. She sighed with relief when Pearce took over, carefully but firmly pushed the shirt aside after using a tip of it to wipe the blood away. She felt a new sting when he placed gloved fingers at the side of the wound to get a better look.

"Grazing shot, mostly cauterised itself," he said after a moment. "Let a doctor look at it."

She didn't dare lower her arm, she didn't want to agitate the wound, so she dropped the arm along the back of the couch.

"Next time," Pearce said. "Don't force a confrontation."

"Waiting for rescue can take a too long," she stated coldly, pulling a face and pulling herself back into a sitting position. "How did you know when to shoot?"

"Camera from the building across the street," he said and she could've sworn he smirked when her gaze automatically searched in the comparative darkness beyond her windows. She couldn't see anything out there.

"And I was listening in with the mic on your laptop," he added.

She looked at the laptop, too, then back at him. In retrospect, she blamed the adrenaline, but perhaps it was something else entirely, something the woman had stirred up when she challenged her. Of course it would have been the smarter choice to sit tight and wait for rescue, but there had been one time in her life when she hadn't fought back when she should have.

Or it _was_ the adrenaline, but Pearce looked good this close and he hadn't moved away yet. Serious. Trustworthy _._ In the end, she supposed, there were worse reasons than trust. Pain pulled on her skin as she put her hand on his neck and the most surprising thing, in the end, was that she managed to surprise him at all, tightened her grip on him and leaned in, kissed him with all she had, because she was certain it would only be a moment…

His lips were dry under hers, slightly cracked, parted when she took him unaware and he didn't respond at all, just let himself be kissed in unexpected, counterpoint passivity, but she didn't remember how to stop, just coaxed and at least he was alive and warm and then he _did_ kiss back, aggressive enough to match her sudden hunger. She felt the tendons in his neck strain under her fingers, but she couldn't tell if he fought with leaning away or into it.

The edge of his cap scratched the side of her head and it seemed to be the incentive for him to pull back. She didn't want to let go, sucked his tongue back into her mouth and followed him back, despite the new tear in her side. He settled a hand on her arm, held her and finally freed himself from her, but he was still too close, easy to reach if it didn't hurt so much. She couldn't read in his face, couldn't tell what there was in his eyes, but she knew she wanted more of it.

The light in the hallway turned on, closely followed by cautious footsteps outside. Her door was given a faint shove, just enough to make it open a few inches more. Pearce tensed away from her, turned so his back was fully to the door. Donna forced her head back up and hoped she had her facial expression back under control.

"Ms. Dean?" a male voice inquired.

"I'm all right!" she announced. "Just… a little trouble."

Her neighbour edged a little further into the room, but not enough to spot the bound woman or to get a good look at Pearce. His attention was fixed on Donna anyway.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Like I said…occupational hazard," she waved with her arm vaguely. "You know I work for the cops, right? They'll be here any minute, it's under control."

"… yes?" he asked. His gaze flitted around, rested on Pearce for a moment. "Do you need any help?"

"I already have help," Donna said, forced a reassuring smile. "It's fine, really. Cops will take your statement, don't go back to bed immediately."

"Okay, Ms. Dean," he nodded. "I'll be just down the hall."

He withdrew, she heard him talk to somebody else, some other neighbour in the hallway, but no one appeared at her door again.

She took a deep breath, still tasting him on her lips. "You…" she started, unsure herself of what she would say next, but she could already tell he was going to leave. She didn't think he liked surprises much, even this kind of surprise.

A frown had settled on his face and he straightened the cap. "We really should call the cops," he said and she wasn't sure if he was affected by what she had done at all. "Will you be okay?"

"Sure," she said, chewing on her lower lip. The woman was stirring back to consciousness slowly, but she wouldn't be back in fighting condition any time soon. "What should I say?"

"She's got a history of psychological issues," he shrugged and got up from the couch. "It's easy to discredit most of what she says. I was here, I helped, because the vigilante does that. Other than that, you don't know me. Should work out."

She pressed her arm to her side carefully, but couldn't quite decide if it made the pain better or worse. She listened to his 911 call. She watched as he went back to the woman to check her bounds and got spit in the face for his trouble.

They waited in heavy silence, together and strangely apart, until Pearce's phone told him a police cruiser had just stopped outside her apartment building and he left with just a quick nod in her direction.

She didn't know what she should have said, either.

* * *

_"Yes?"_

"I thought you wanted to know about Allison Paxton? Unless you already do, of course."

_"She's 41 years old, divorced, her gym is facing foreclosure. She was in Afghanistan and honourably discharged five years ago. How is she doing?"_

"Depends, but I'd say not so good. She's obsessed with you. She'll stay in custody for now. Whether she'll face hospitalisation or prison, I don't know."

_"You had any trouble?"_

"Not really, but the vigilante saving me better not become a habit."

_"This one's my fault anyway."_

"She claimed we were in league, but she can't prove anything and she's not calm enough to make people listen to her. I feel a little sorry for her, even though I still want to punch her. I didn't get a good look at her file, I don't have that kind of authority, but people tell me things."

_"I have a little more, if you want."_

"Yes, she invaded my home, after all, might as well know why… So, uhm, Pearce…"

_"Call me Aiden."_

" _Aiden_ , well, that's… I really don't know how to say this, so I'll just forgo any eloquence. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come on to you like that. That was pretty embarrassing and I don't know, I probably made you feel uncomfortable. I don't even know you that well. Maybe you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or you just don't do this sort of thing. I shouldn't have… just… I should've… Dammit, say something."

_"None of those."_

"What?"

_"No girlfriend, no boyfriend, no abstinence. I just lead a very strange life."_

"I really am sorry. That was clumsy. I must have gone rusty in the Infinite 92. Not like I had to do a lot of flirting in that place. Everyone knew why they were there, after all. I guess I just don't remember what it's like out here in the real world. It's been a long time since I had the freedom to, well, to make my own choices."

_"I'm flattered."_

"I still put my foot in my mouth. And it irks me, because I can't take it back and because I'm afraid it's going to change things between us. I don't even know if there's anything between us in the first place, but I'm so very grateful that you wanted to trust me and gave me that job. I can imagine… I doubt trust comes easy to you. It doesn't for me, not anymore. But what you do? I agree with what I've seen and if I can help more, I want to. But… I didn't need to make things more complicated."

_"We do work well together."_

"So… what's changed now? Will I live it down?"

_"Don't worry, it's the fight, it gets to you sometimes. And I should apologise, too."_

"How is that?"

_"I don't really know what happened to you at the Infinite 92, but I don't want you to feel obliged to me in any way. Certainly not that way."_

"That's what you think?"

_"It's a possibility. I don't want to use you."_

"Other than for planting those bugs?"

_"I asked, you agreed. Besides, you told me you wanted to help and it was a good match. Just business."_

"And you think kissing could be just business for me?"

_"Wasn't it?"_

"I don't think you have the right to have an opinion on that. Maybe… maybe we should both not second-guess each other. And this conversation? It's just making things worse. I can't take back what happened, I can't take back what I've said, either. I don't need anyone to judge me, not even you. And if that's going to be a problem, I don't know if..."

_"Donna."_

"Yes?"

_"I'm going to send you what I have on Allison Paxton."_

"What does she have to do with it?"

_"I know much more about you than you know about me. If you still want to… after this… I'd like to invite you to dinner."_

* * *

**To** : Donna Dean

**From** : AP

**Message:** I don't really remember the event, only ctos does.

**Attachment:** ctos_p_recording_flagged_vigilante_a_paxton

"… vigilante has to die."

_"You sound so serious."_

"He killed them! He killed my babies! And he probably doesn't even know or care or… I dunno. Look, I saw him. I was stuck in the car, but he was there, the cops had him cornered after the steam pipe blew out. Everything was chaos, but I've been to war, I don't lose my head like that. I know what I _saw."_

_"I didn't doubt what you saw, Allison, I know what kind of soldier you are. But are you sure? It sounds like an accident. Steam pipes blow sometimes."_

"Yes, maybe. Good timing, though, that took out two cop cruisers. Besides, I wasn't close enough to the pipe. We were _all_ still alive at that point. We only crashed and the twins were crying, but I can tell, they weren't hurt, just scared. I know the sounds they make… Fuck."

_"I don't know what to say. I'm so sorry. And all the sorries in the world won't change a thing."_

"Yeah, they won't. But he will be sorry when I'm through with him."

_"But…"_

"Because we were stuck, cars boxed us in from three side and the cops were going past on the other side, trying to cut off his escape and you know what he fucking did? He jumped on the roof of a car and fired at us. Looked like a grenade launcher to me, but there was steam everywhere, not sure with kind. He was aiming for the police and he hit a cruiser perfectly. You never heard just how loud it is when a whole car blows up. Deafens you when you're so close. You get that ringing in your ear and it sometimes doesn't go away for days. We were thrown around in the shockwave… and… fire everywhere and shards from the blown-up up car were flying everywhere… there was fire and smoke and… my babies were suddenly silent. So don't you _dare_ tell me it wasn't his fault. It was. He fired a grenade in the midst of all that to save his own skin, so he didn't have to stand fucking trial for his crimes."

_"Do you even know what you're saying? You can't just take the law in your own hands. That's the mistake_ he _made. That's what caused all of this. You're just making everything so much worse."_

"The authorities can't touch him. Every time they try something like this happens. I can't be the first person who lost someone… everything… in all this bullshit. He's dangerous and I've seen that, too, you know. Sometimes people just snap. You give them a gun and tell them to become an accomplished killer and when they do, you give them a medal. And then they kill and sometimes they forget how to stop. It's a fucking power-trip and not everyone can or wants to get down from it. And that's him, I swear. Standing on that car? Like he was out of some hero-worship movie? This guy's tripping _hard_."

_"Perhaps it's more complicated than that."_

"What sort of bullshit argument is that even?!"

_"Probably the truth. Allison, please, listen. Think for a moment. You lost so much. How much more does it have to be? Who will_ you _hurt, trying to catch him?"_

"I'll be careful, not like him."

_"How will you even find him?"_

"I don't know yet. But I'll find a way. There's nothing else left I can do."

_"Yes, there is. Let it go. We are all here to help, if you'd let us."_

"No… but… thank you, but I can't. I'm sorry, but I can't."

_"Allison, please…"_

"I'm going to hang up now. I'm so sorry. I can't… Bye, Dad."

_"Allison? Damn, girl, don't do this, don't…"_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Revised on 05/June/2015 and 11/May/2017**


	4. _Nightcall: Flashpoint – Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "So…" Aiden said quietly. "Best or worst first date ever?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning:** Don't drink and drive (unless you're a fictional badass)!
> 
> **Another warning:** Riding shotgun with a crazy driver is _not_ fun. Aiden's really lucky Poppy's got a him-shaped blind spot because he's just asking to be punched in the throat for all of that.

[takes place early spring 2015]

* * *

It was a cosy little restaurant, hidden away in a Chicago School building between two far more imposing skyscrapers, the light on its rustic, wooden sign lost among the glittering brightness of the city around it. It was Italian, but not just pizza and pasta, but authentic, far more varied food spread out over several courses and accompanied by rich red wine.

They had found each other the wrong way around, she knew. There was too much knowledge, too many dark secret they had already shared and that wasn't how it was done. You didn't know these things about someone who might — or might not — be your lover, before you knew the names of their parents and the school they went to. There was no script for this.

_She_ was nervous and tried not to let it show, until the first flutter passed.

If Aiden was nervous at all, she couldn't tell. He was smiling more than she had ever seen him, casually talkative in a way she hadn't expected, easily picking out topics that were neither minefields nor meaningless chatter.

For a man who was such a mystery to the world, he didn't seem to mind her questions. He'd grown up in Belfast until just before his fourteenth birthday, when his mother had taken her children and ran all the way to Chicago to escape.

"What's your father like?" she asked.

"Now? I don't know," he shrugged, looked into his glass rather than her. "Never really looked back. He was a man who always got things wrong. I think he meant well, but he just made everything worse. He got into debt, he got into debt _with the mob,_ he got into fights, drank too much. The tragedy probably is, all he wanted was to keep us safe, give us a better life. Things just never worked out for him. The harder he tried, the worse it got."

And she, on the other hand, she had thought she'd found her true love at fifteen and ran away with him. Her mother had insisted she'd get an education and stop hanging out with a member of a biker gang. So she'd left, like teenagers do.

"It turns out, mothers sometimes know what they're talking about," Donna said, smiling sadly. "After two weeks, I was heartbroken and alone and, yeah, _broke._ I got work as a waitress. It was a Club-owned bar, but I didn't know that then."

Neither of their histories had a happy ending, but they knew that part already and there seemed no real point in saying it aloud. The wine was good, though, and so was the food.

"If you ran with the gangs," she said at some point. "Maybe we've met before."

"Or maybe I'd already stopped running with gangs by the time you were born."

In the end, the waiter appeared at their table with the bill and an earnest-faced offer to call them a cab. He glanced over the wine bottles on the table, somewhat pointedly when the question seemed to take Aiden by surprise. He didn't _seem_ drunk, but that wasn't the point.

"Yes," Donna said. "Thank you."

The waiter withdrew and Aiden gave her slow grin.

"I thought I was supposed to steal you a car," he said.

Considering how he'd already picked her up with a Magnate once, the fact that he'd picked her up today in a far more mundane car hadn't escaped her. So he'd offered to steal her a better one on the way home. She hadn't been sure if he had been joking. Besides, back in the day, she'd have been perfectly capable of stealing her own car. Modern safety features, however, might present a problem.

It was cool outside the restaurant, still early in spring and the cold crept back in with sundown, but Donna stopped and put her head back, took a deep breath, even though they were in the middle of the city and beside an almost clogged city street. It felt good, but she didn't quite know why.

She opened her eyes again and looked back at Aiden. Smiling, acting less on impulse than the first time she'd put the moves on him, she picked up his unresisting hand and wrapped it around her waist.

"I'm supposed to be reformed," she said, somewhat belatedly, to the possibility of stealing a car. "I'm a _consultant_ for the CPD."

"I see," he said, leaning into her a little for emphasis. "You're really trying to arrest me."

Waiting for the cab, they walked a few leisurely steps along the sidewalk.

"I'll bring my handcuffs next time," she smirked.

"But the high security ones," he added. "The others aren't much of a challenge."

His phone gave a low beep and he stopped. She felt the tension in his body as he pulled the phone out.

"Someone's calling the cops," he said. He held the phone out in front of them, turning up the volume.

_"Hello? Shit! I think he's here! The vigilante's right here! I can see him!"_

Staring down on the phone, Aiden turned slowly on his heel and she swung with him rather than let go.

"Across the street," he said. She followed his gaze and saw a man stand in a doorway with a phone at his ear, staring back at them. Even at the distance, she could see the sudden panic on his face when his gaze connected with Aiden's.

_"… oh shit shit shit, I think he's seen me! What do I do? What do I do?!"_

_"Sir, please remain calm, ctOS has eyes on you. You are not in immediate danger. Police will be with you shortly."_

"What do we do?" Donna asked.

"Stay close," Aiden suggested calmly. "You can't be identified while you're within range of my scrambler. Unfortunately, by now it's real people looking at the feeds. They can't see us, but they can see the pixillation."

With a slight smile, Aiden bent his head towards the caller, who flinched and tried to pull back into the shadows of the doorway.

Aiden said, "I'm afraid you're stuck with me until we get to a blind spot. Unless you'd rather take your chances with your friends at CPD?"

She contemplated it, but not seriously. It'd be the third time her name cropped up in connection to the vigilante, perhaps not often enough to confirm anything, but more than enough to suspect a pattern and make her colleagues look a little closer at her activities. She'd be damned if she was going to spent her newly gained freedom under such close scrutiny.

"No," she said. "You're stuck with _me."_

The first siren made itself heard above the backdrop noise of the traffic. Aiden scanned the street up and down for a moment, then tucked her along to a sleek, black car. It unlocked to a flash of its headlights. Aiden stepped out of her grip, opened the door for her with a quick, ironic smile. He slammed the door closed and hurried around the car.

Through the mirrors, Donna tracked him, spotted the first police cruiser as it turned into the street, thick traffic hampering its advance despite the siren and flashing lights.

Aiden tapped his phone as he got in the car, but put it away once the screen in the car's centre stack had picked up the phone's interface. A map of their surroundings and, even as Donna watched, several threatening red dots appeared on the screen. Police radio came in over the speakers, distorted and confusing, but more than enough to reveal not just where everyone was, but where everyone was going.

"Buckle up," Aiden said, but it was the only warning she got and he didn't give her time to comply.

He got the car out of the parking spot with quick, precise movement, veered into traffic in a far too small gap. The tyres of the car behind them screamed as its driver hit the brakes. Donna held on tight, but the car was expensive, even speed and the harsh way Aiden took it around corners barely translated into anything other than a push and pull in her throat.

It was hard to tell just how close everything was, just how badly this could go south, just how much damage their expensive car would take in a head-on collision, but it was _near misses_ all around. Aiden wove through traffic, using all lanes and the police lagging behind, getting caught in accidents caused by the other drivers confused reaction.

Donna stole a quick look at the map and the police were trying to surround them, take them from all directions and the chatter confirmed it. And there it was, a police cruiser cut around the corner of a crossroads just ahead of them.

"Hold tight," Aiden warned, but there wasn't much more she could do, really. With some effort, she took her attention away from the police car and studied his face, what she could make out, anyway. He seemed calm, concentrated, casual enough with just one hand on the steering wheel while his other hand hovered over the touchscreen.

She braced herself, saw Aiden flick a finger over the screen and tore the car sharply to the right at the same time.

The street ripped open under the pressure of a ruptured steam pipe, it picked up the cars and pieces of concrete, tossed them around like toys, threw them into nearby buildings and each other. Over the radio, there was surprised screaming and the sound of breaking metal.

Despite Aiden's evasion, the shockwave still got them, steam closing down the windshield and they scratched past a building before Aiden got the car back on the street.

Chaos filled the rear-view mirror, even the cars not caught in the immediate blast radius had stopped messily and at random, completely blocking off the street, trapping the rest of the police cruisers behind them.

Aiden slowed down just a bit, took quick turns through a series of side streets until there was no police cruisers marked on the map anymore. According to the chatter, they had lost track of them.

Aiden glanced at her briefly.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Well, you got me that car," she said. "Even if I probably can't keep it."

She thought of the people caught in the crashes behind them, wondered how badly they'd been hurt, never mind the money it would cost to repair the pipe and the street, all the damaged cars and other city structure.

She didn't understand why it was necessary to hound Aiden quite this much. She was aware of the unease of law enforcement, of course, she spoke with them everyday, after all. A vigilante was problematic for many reasons, she _understood_ — even if she didn't agree — why they needed him caught and off the streets. Whether it was worth it, she wasn't so sure.

"I could let you…" he began but couldn't finish the offer. "Shit," he muttered.

"We aren't out of it, yet," he pointed out and as if on cue, a helicopter suddenly dipped down right in front of them between the skyscrapers and the message came through the other chatter clear as day, sounding somewhat self-satisfied. _"Target reacquired!"_

Aiden dropped his right hand from the screen down to the handbrake, tore the steering wheel to the side and the car made a perfect U-turn and sped down the street. His hand returned to the screen, hit one of the buttons and the helicopter suddenly shook unsteadily, it's lights flickering.

"What…?" Donna said, despite herself.

"Don't worry," Aiden assured her. "It's not dangerous if the pilot knows his job."

She kept it in sight as well she could, hanging there precariously between the skyscrapers, wobbling, too close to the reflective surfaces of the buildings. Below it, two police cruisers overtook the slower traffic on two sides, one scraping over the sidewalk and tearing along the edge of a bus stop shelter and shattering its glass.

Another turn took both the helicopter and the police cruisers out of sight for barely a moment before they were on them again.

As if in slow motion, she saw one of the cops lean out of the window of the car.

"Are they _shooting?"_ she asked, unnecessarily, because by the time she'd finished the question, the first bullet hit the trunk.

"Yeah," Aiden said, zig-zagged the car as more bullets came their way. "But it's only for the tyres, not trying to hit us. Yet."

She snapped her head around at his tone, watched his face again. The calm concentration was falling away even as she watched, replaced by a focussed intensity. She had seen hints of it, flashes, in the car after the Indigo State, something in his eyes after he'd taken down the woman in her apartment. She wasn't sure…

Maybe she liked it more than she should.

Aiden hit the brakes hard, yanked the wheel and brought the car into an enclosed parking lot, it's closed barrier shattered over the hood and wiped over the windshield.

"I like this part," Aiden announced, tapped the screen and behind them, two police cruisers smashed into the boulders that shot up at the entrance of the parking lot. One of the sirens gave a pitiful yowl, than tapered off into silence. Smoke engulfed the deformed cars, too much to see whether their occupants got out alive or not, but she guessed that that's what airbags were for.

The helicopter swerved back in sight as they crossed the parking lot, broke through the wire fence and out on the other side. Aiden forced their car through the parked cars there, back into the traffic as if he _knew_ everyone was going to brake for him. As it was, the other cars _did_ try to avoid them, some wasting time on honking or flashing lights before they cleared the street anyway. Nevertheless, they sheared past another car and for a moment, Donna saw the wide-eyed shock of its driver as the sparks flew between them and the metal screamed.

They were under an L-track now, hidden from the helicopter and once Aiden had boxed his way through the small pileup he had caused the road seemed clear, despite the sirens audible everywhere. The helicopter pilot complained through the radio, announced he was circling, trying to catch the target sneaking away.

"Watch this," Aiden said and the amusement was finally obvious.

He brought the car between the lanes, just enough space to squeeze through if all the other cars behaved. He flicked another button and hit the gas.

The acceleration pushed her back in her seat, eyes going wide. The straight road ahead of them, as far as she could see, the traffic lights turned green. Aiden raced the car at full speed in between the slower cars, the engine roared, more than it had done earlier. Perhaps a stray bullet had damaged something, or perhaps she was only now listening to it.

"Rear-view," Aiden suggested smugly.

She looked in the mirror and behind them, the traffic lights had began to dance like overzealous Christmas lights and the cars with confused and overwhelmed drivers crashed into each other, choking the street for any pursuer.

Aiden slowed down only marginally before he took a sharp right turn to where one of the bridges was raised just ahead of them.

_"I got sight of him ag…"_ came over the radio, broken up when the helicopter was again hacked, shivering uncertainly and tipping to the side and behind a building.

The bridge began to lower and Donna realised they were not going to wait until it was down. Aiden just sped up, past the other waiting cars and the slowly moving bridge was a steep ramp, slowing even the powerful car more than Donna had expected.

The car shot over the end of the bridge and it felt like they hung in the air for a long minute, as if gravity itself had stopped while in reality, of course, they were flying for only a handful of seconds. Enough time for Aiden to tap another button, but Donna registered it only distantly.

They landed hard. The bridge had began to raise again while they were above it and it was just as steep on the other side, the car's back wheels lost contact with the ground and for the first time, Aiden put both hands to the wheel, wrestling back his control. The car broke out and turned as it suddenly got all wheels back on the ground at the bottom of the bridge.

The front right tyre blew with a sharp snap, the car sagged suddenly and rotated to a halt in a mess of scratched metal and overheated rubber. A thin line of smoke curled upward from the front of the car.

Aiden watched it, then dismissed it with a shrug.

"Donna?" he asked as he tilted his head in her direction. "Still breathing?"

"I'm not sure," and it came out breathless enough.

It was, she decided later, only fair. He put his hand to the side of her face, a lazy stroke of his fingers along her jaw and bent towards her, kissed her, just a touch of his lips at first, than a slow slide of his tongue until she leaned into him.

The kiss stole what air she still had in her lungs, made her both melt and feel heat crawl up her spine and shoot back down her body. It was Aiden who shifted back, though smiling and she had to resist the urge to just recapture his lips and keep going, as if they hadn't just crash-landed in the middle of a busy city street during the tail end of a police chase.

"So…" he said quietly. "Best or worst first date ever?"

She laughed. "I don't know," she said faintly. "Is it already over?"

He smirked and the expression turned sinister when suddenly the entire district was plunged into darkness and all that remained was the glare of headlights, cutting through their car from all sides.

"Okay," Aiden said. "Let's go then."

Both their doors were jammed. She kicked hers open before Aiden had a chance to round the car, but he caught her hand and helped her to her feet.

"This way," he said and pulled her along through the stopped cars.

The helicopter was back, circling high above, aimlessly searching and adding just one more bright light to all the others, too eratic to illuminate anything much at all.

Aiden led her away from the main street and into a labyrinth of back alleys. He had to be navigating all of this by intuition rather than sight, because the faint light from his phone barely reached past their feet.

"Better now?" he asked when he finally slowed down. The lights came on reluctantly, slipped back over piles of trash and other backstreet debris. A rat scurried away, surprised by the light and the two people intruding on its territory.

"What?"

"Breathing."

He was still holding her hand and she squeezed it, held on to him so he didn't get away again as she moved close, wrapped his arm around her waist again, the way she had earlier.

"Getting there," she chuckled.

"That wasn't the plan, by the way," he said. "I didn't think anyone would recognise me."

"Well, _I_ wouldn't have recognised you," she told him. "In a suit and without a gun."

They strode together and eventually, the back alley opened up to another city street. This one had clearly not suffered, traffic slipped past peacefully enough, except for the occasional honking or cursing driver. Party-goers filled the sidewalk and took them within their crowd without a hitch and this time, what attention they attracted was harmless, a passing assessment of just another couple.

Her mind settled slowly, slower than her heartbeat and her breathing, both of which had gone back to normal. She was grateful he didn't say anything, gave her that space. Perhaps he understood things better than she gave him credit for.

It wasn't that she didn't know what she wanted. The opposite, in fact, but seducing Aiden Pearce was proving to be more of an adventure than she had anticipated.

"Aiden," she said.

He didn't answer, but he tightened his arm around her a little in answer.

"I don't want to play any games. They're such a waste of time."

He shifted slightly and she felt his gaze, searching her face, but she looked straight ahead rather than meet it.

When he continued to says nothing, she continued, "What I mean is, I don't think I want to sit in a cab by your side without touching. I don't want to play 'do you want to come up for coffee'. I don't have time for that."

"What do you want?" he asked and she couldn't quite tell if he was serious or flirty.

"You," she said, simply and, although her voice and mind were both steady, she felt her cheeks heat up. "Without any games."

She was close enough to feel his posture change, just slightly. His hand shifted and for a moment she thought he was going to let go of her, be the gentleman he pretended to be when the lights were on.

Instead, he tugged her gently, steered her in another direction.

"Alright," he said. "No games."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Revised on 05/June/2015 and 11/May/2017**


	5. _Nightcall: Flashpoint – Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You'll have to tell me to stop," Aiden growled darkly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While this _seems_ like it can be safely skipped, there are bits of characterisation scattered throughout. Mostly Poppy, but there's stuff on Aiden, too, though his is less obvious. Very little is accidental. 
> 
> I think I've never written this much explicit stuff. It put an incredible strain on my vocabulary. Appreciate it, dammit!
> 
> **Fun with Statistics:** Aiden is almost certainly uncircumcised.

_The fight gets to you sometimes,_ Aiden had said on the phone. Easily, dismissively, maybe he'd been in that place so many times, it didn't register anymore for him. If it was true for fights, it must be true for car chases, too. Part of her was surprised they even made it to the hotel room after the truth was out, a deal made and sealed. Part of her was surprised they even made it to the _elevator._

They kissed, hard and sharp, the first _real_ kiss, without any stunned immobility in either of them, without any reservations left. It hadn't really registered with her just how tall he was, how broad, before he pushed her into the wall, just inside the darkened room. In a moment of clarity, she still saw the bright light from the hallway, outlining the door where it hadn't fallen closed completely.

Aiden wrapped both hands around her waist, pulled her hips from the wall and against him, towering over her and stealing all control of the kiss from her. All she could do, all she could _think_ of doing, was to fist her hands into the fine cloth of his jacket, pulling and tearing at it uselessly.

He somehow managed to shrug the jacket off without taking his hands from her for more than a second, but let go of her mouth. He painted a wet trail along her jaw, bit the skin just below her ear.

"You'll have to tell me to stop," he growled darkly.

It seemed like a ridiculous idea, but she was too short of breath to articulate it. She turned her head, instead, sharply, and caught his mouth again. Not a kiss this time, more a bite in her haste, shearing into his lower lip, making him grasp. She sunk her nails into his neck, the only part of bare skin she could reach, and slung one leg around his waist. Her dress rode up her thighs and cut into her flesh when there wasn't quite enough give in the material.

She wriggled her hips, trying to get it out of the way. There were still too many clothes on both of them anyway, she decided, let his mouth go free and leaned her head back. The movement was a little too hard, or the wall was closer than she'd anticipated and the sudden pain sharpened all her senses, acutely aware of everything around her. The sting of her dress, the indistinct pressure of Aiden's hips between her legs, the cool of the drying saliva along her neck, the way her fast breathing cut past her teeth.

It was too dark to see the details of his face, so she just had to _know_ that his eyes were an intense green, though his pupils would be blown so wide, she wouldn't be able to see it even with the lights on. They were still in that moment, just a heartbeat, looking for confirmation perhaps, a connection beyond naked lust. It didn't last, she didn't have the patience to let it and it had been so long since she'd been with anyone she cared about or really wanted.

She tightened her hold on his neck, spread her fingers out through his hair and pulled his head down for another kiss, she couldn't get enough of it, like it was a contest she couldn't back out of until she'd won.

Aiden slipped one hand down her thigh, pushed the skirt up and finally she was free to move. She pulled her leg higher and ground her pelvis into his.

While she was quite content just mindlessly rutting against him, Aiden seemed capable of several simultaneous things, each one making her breathe faster and grind harder. He got to the zipper at the back of her dress and pulled it open all the way down to her the small of her back, unhooking her bra as he went, his kiss never stuttered. The straps slipped down her arms as far as they could go.

Blindly, she fingered for the collar of his shirt, fingers too tense and eager to do more than pull at the buttons there. She hissed in frustration and it sounded animalistic in her own ears. She didn't care, she didn't want to wait.

"Get that off," she demanded, fingers tight in his shirt. He followed her order perfectly, unbuttoning the shirt with predictable efficiency, slipping it over his head when he had enough room, tousling his hair worse than her earlier attack had left it.

She leaned away from him for a moment, enough space to watch and appraise him. She had seen enough of him, out on the street, in Chicago PD's coveted vigilante videos, to know just how fit he was, because if he weren't, most of the stunts on those videos would have made him an embarrassment on the first try and killed him on the second.

Hurriedly, she pulled on the straps of her dress and slipped it, along with her bra, from her shoulders, moved her body sinuously until the dress finally passed her hips and pooled around her feet.

She reached for him, hooked her finger into the waistband of his trousers and pulled him close, finally getting eager hands on him, tracing the finely chiselled muscles up his chest as if she was blind and needed to map him in his entirety with her fingertips. She wrapped an arm around his neck, stepped in close again and pressed her body to his, moaning in anticipation even before they connected. She thought he smelled of thunder, charged and electrifying.

There was just enough give in the waistband of his trousers to slip her hand inside and grope him shamelessly. It got him to groan and sway on his feet, leaning into her before he steadied himself and it was an addictive thrill all its own just to see that reaction. He wrapped an arm around her back, traced down her spine and she shivered, nerves standing on edge under his touch.

He put a hand to her chin, deftly lifted her face up to kiss her again with the same consuming ferocity of before, the same practised dominance that made her want to melt into his arms.

His other hand pushed past her panties, cupped her arse and used the leverage to pull her back against him. It crushed the hand she had down his trousers, made them both hiss and growl, but not stop. She got her hand free, but only so she could get the fly open.

"Aiden…" she started, with a last sliver of reason. "I've got condoms in my bag…"

"I haven't the slightest where it is," he chuckled. She felt one of his hands leave her body briefly and then he held out a small packet in front of her. "But you can rely on me."

"So," she teased. "You thought you'd get lucky, huh?"

"That makes two of us, doesn't it?"

She grinned at that, quick and lost again, because anticipation was already tipping down and sideways and she felt she was going to burst if she had to wait any longer. She let go of him and snapped her hands back to herself, watching with greedy eyes as he rolled the condom on. She felt his gaze on her face, stroking his own flesh, unabashed.

She bared her teeth in a grin and _pounced_. She wrapped both her legs around him, feeling herself open up. Her wet fingers left damp lines on his neck and along his jaw as she gripped his face.

He'd caught her easily, found his balance with half a step back under the impact. He dug his fingers into her thighs and hoisted her higher. The muscles in her legs strained under the effort, she didn't want to be suspended over _nothing,_ she didn't want to be open and wet and deprived of stimulation.

She mewled, kissed him fiercely, too sloppy to make it last. But it was only a second. Aiden crushed her back into the wall, gave her something else to arch off of, the rough texture sticking to her slowly sweat-slickening skin. He let go with one arm, bent lower and slung first one, than her other leg over his arms. She felt his clever fingers below and then he pressed inside her.

She bit his tongue, choking on a pleased whine. Aiden shook his head free, throat bared away from her and his face was close enough now, glittering eyes and parted lips. He watching her face, the emotions as they carved themselves into her expression. He rolled his hips, slowly at first, but picking up speed and force with each cascading moan it drove from her.

She was deliciously trapped between the hard wall and Aiden's unyielding body, ramming into her, taking her over. She canted her hips forward, meeting his thrusts and the entire length of his body rubbed against her with each shift and jolt of either of them.

Everything was hot, too hard, soaked through with sweat from the exertion. The pleasure rolled over her, much too fast and too soon, it stole her breath, gasping soundlessly. Aiden pressed his cheek to hers, a wanton groan in her ear. Impossible as it seemed, he managed to drive himself into her even harder, faster, she felt the way his rhythm stuttered.

She'd have loved to see his face, but she had her own face buried in the nape of his neck, clawing into his back, no doubt leaving angry red welts on his skin there as she tried to climb higher.

"Don't stop," she pleaded. "Don't stop."

He didn't, even if his body felt so tense she wouldn't have been surprised if he shattered into pieces under her fingers, just fell apart on her. But she'd been so close to the edge from the start, from the moment in the car, from the moment _in her apartment,_ he didn't have to torment himself for much longer.

Her body locked up, suddenly, the wave crashing from one moment to the next, leaving her light-headed and her body out of her control, clenching and spasming, nerve ends all alight and leaving her body boneless in its wake. It tore an oddly high-pitched moan from Aiden's deep voice, his hips jerking back sharply once she relaxed enough to let him go.

He leaned in over her, as if seeking the support of the wall to keep them both up. He pushed one of her legs up so it hung over his shoulder. She wasn't sure her legs would support her if they toppled over.

"Donna," Aiden said and he sounded both out of breath and grinning.

She blinked at the sound of her name, trying to focus. He caught her gaze and dragged it along with his to the side.

The room was still mostly in darkness, but to the right of them, the door was still a black square outlined by stripes of brightness. It took a moment until the haze in her mind allowed her to figure out the significance.

Carefully shifting her weight to his other arm, Aiden reached out and gave the door a slight shove, enough to make it fall closed, swallowing the light.

"Shit," she whispered. "It was open all the time?"

She looked back at Aiden, met his gaze in the darkness, saw just enough to make out the amusement in the curl of his lips. She started to laugh, it just came over her, folding her face back into his shoulder, her body shaking. It helped relax her legs and Aiden lowered her gently.

She was still laughing. After a little moment, he joined in.

* * *

The room was a blur, lost at the edges of her perception, inconsequential in the larger scheme of things. Vaguely, she realised the sheets on the bed were smooth and slippery and the bed itself was large and welcoming, like a perfect playground. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, and she was no longer willing to let herself be startled by anything Aiden did, he had a way of thinking things through, more than anyone else she'd ever met.

He had a way with reading her body, too, it seemed, in a casual and irreverent way that would be insulting from anyone else. With him, it was just exciting, a part of his allure. She wasn't sure if she bought into the legend of him, that urban myth within the streets of Chicago, but she couldn't deny that it made for the better fantasy in her head to complement the real physicality of the here and now.

She clawed her fingers into the blankets, flexing her back and shaking her arse in the moment before he sheathed himself inside her again. She bucked back against him immediately, sucked in her breath sharply, whimpered his name.

Aiden slid his arm around her, up between her breasts and wrapped his fingers delicately around her throat, pulled her up sharply, straining her back in an arch.

"C'mon," he rumbled by her head. "Don't fake it."

She wasn't…

…or she _was_ and it was survival instinct, deeply ingrained habit and it tore her from the moment like a splash of cold water. The last thing she wanted to think about, the one truth she didn't want to face, not now and not later, either. In this instant, the feeling of flesh had nothing enticing, nothing she wanted despite the remnant tingling in her nerves where he touched her.

She needed to get _back_ to where she was before, because the thought of losing this, now, in the middle of everything was unbearable in all possible ways. Aiden couldn't see her face, or just a little of it and because she felt his teeth, she knew he was too close anyway.

"How?" she breathed, pushing back against him still, because the sparks were still there and her body didn't ask permission before it moved. She just needed to get back to the point of ignition.

Aiden chuckled, low. "Done this before," he said. "And I haven't really started."

And there it was, the fire she'd so briefly lost, when he got his hand under her and his fingers down between her legs. She lurched forward, driving her own throat into his other hand and her voice cracked and broke. She couldn't think straight, just rutted back against him, mindlessly and so hard she wasn't sure if the pleasure would break into pain and shatter her.

She curled her hips away from him, back arching up like an angry cat's. Each hard thrust shifted them across the bed, the smooth cloth offering no hold for her, nothing to help balance against every hard push.

She hissed in frustration when he took his hand away from her, left her exposed, unsatisfied and still straining, opened wide around him.

Aiden covered her, she felt his lips on her upper back, on her neck, teeth grazing her tingling skin and making her shiver. She turned her head, caught his fingers between her teeth and swiped her tongue over them. With her mouth open, it was far easier for sounds to escape her, spill from her lips, firmly beyond her control.

She stuttered his name and felt him shift his weight behind her and his free hand found her arm, closed around her wrist and pulled her loose and she tumbled forward, yelping as his angle inside her suddenly changed. He closed that hand on the side of her hip, held on so hard she felt the pressure down to her bones.

He picked up speed, she heard his voice close by her ear, sandpaper rough in the rhythm of each thrust.

Her freed hand found its way down her body of its own accord and she wailed and shivered under her own touch, at the feeling of him moving inside, chanting his name in some spiritual mantra.

She lost whatever train of thought she had, her existence reduced to pure sensation, just flesh, damp and shaking and complaining muscles. She couldn't pay attention to him beyond where he touched her and how he played her, the sound of him by her ear.

She sensed them synchronise, distantly, but it didn't seem to matter, her fingers working furiously and all the other points of feeling, too much and too strong and too hard, until it made her body seize up, white-light heat traveling through it, consuming and devastating and so far beyond amazing she couldn't remember his name even though she was still whimpering it to herself. She couldn't remember _her own_ name or why it mattered at all.

Spasms ran through her, prolonged with each hard thrust, with each moan of his, each flexing of his fingers on her throat.

Her strength left her, flowed away and she crumpled under his weight, flat on the sheets, still shivering in aftershocks when Aiden snarled and let go of her, his hands leaving her and exposing her to the unfeeling air around them.

She felt his grip on her ankle, moved with him mindlessly as he turned her around and splayed her legs on either side of his hips. She slipped down on the bed until she was almost close enough for him to enter her again, but when he didn't, she used her fingers instead.

"Do that again," she demanded, sprawled out before him and feeling the force of her own heartbeat in her chest.

"Give me a few minutes," he said. He sat back, kneeling between her legs. She watched as he slipped the sloppy condom off and tossed it aside, somewhere on the floor. But he leaned forward again, joined his fingers to her inside her own body and kissed her panting, open mouth.

* * *

She couldn't sleep.

At her side, Aiden was snoring and for a little while, listening to him, she thought she just wasn't used to the presence of another person anymore. She poked and prodded him a little in the side and was almost disappointed when he didn't show any sort of predator lightning reflexes. Instead he barely woke, grunted something inaudible and rolled to his side. His breathing was quiet after that, depriving her of the easy explanation she had hoped it to be.

She still couldn't sleep. Suspended in a kind of timelessness, she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling until her eyes had adjusted to the glittering light of the cityscape outside the window and she could see the exact shape of the lamp above and when her gaze trailed down, the outline of the baroque mirror on the wall across the bed, angled back toward it, but it remained too dark to make out more than a bulk of shadows.

For a time, she dwelled on the thought. How she actually hadn't noticed the mirror before, despite how it had been placed, despite its frivolous invitation to _watch._

But there was only so much she could think about it, before her thoughts drifted in another direction and quite suddenly, laying still just seemed unbearable.

She rolled to her feet silently and stood by the bed in indecision. Aiden's breathing was still slow, still fast asleep. Clearly not a man who trusted easily, but there he was, sleeping as if there wasn't a city full of people out to kill him.

She walked past the bed, to where the minibar was. She closed her eyes when she opened its door, she didn't want to see right then, as if this was a spell she'd disturb if she did and although she might be better off, she couldn't do it. She groped in the fridge, picked a bottle at random and took it with her to an armchair by the window. From there, she could see out over the city, hardly sleeping but she was so high above it all, it didn't seem to matter.

It didn't make sense to her. She felt good, her limbs were leaden and a little bit like jelly, her entire body felt just the right kind of sore.

She unscrewed the bottle and took a sip, grimaced when the sweet liquid travelled down her throat, almost too much to swallow and she coughed. Vile stuff, she should have looked after all. Some kind of liqueur, hints of fire in the wake of the sweetness. At least _some_ alcohol, for whatever good that would do.

The point was, and she supposed she could sit here like a pariah in the darkness until morning came, _the point was_ , she knew exactly where the problem was. All she lacked was the courage to finish the thought rather than slap it away at the first opportunity. Like a threat, only realised the moment she looked at it directly.

The point was… she had picked Aiden for herself, whatever dubious reasons for it there might be lurking somewhere in her subconsciousness. _Her_ choice, but there had been moments, when a touch or a sound had thrown her from the present and back, a flash of memory drowning her, of all the men and their games, who _hadn't_ been her choice.

They remained nameless, because she had never bothered trying to remember their names and she'd avoided looking at their faces, so she didn't know those either. And that was all she had, now, all the memory of it, all messed up in her head, carefully hidden away where she had hoped it would stay forever.

She had thought she had done well in the months since. There'd been no nightmares, no insecurities, no _change_ to her personality she could discern. But there she was, in the darkness and cradling a bottle of alcohol she didn't like instead of sleeping as soundly as her lover did — who surely had enough demons of his own to keep him up.

She took another sip from the bottle, grimaced at the taste and put it back, cradling against her breast until the glass had warmed. The room was cool, but not uncomfortable, it could be minutes, or an hour already. She felt tired, but not sleepy enough to go back to the bed.

She took a deep breath instead, blinked in the darkness and watched the glittering lights of the city outside the window. It was quite a pretty sight, after all.

A slight turn of her head would mean she could read the faintly illuminated digits on the television. Enough to know how late it was, or to judge how long she'd already sat there. She thought of it when she heard Aiden stir, a low rustle of blankets and the slightest groan from the mattress as he sat up.

Without looking at him, she felt his gaze rest on her, huddled in her armchair. She waited, she had the impression they _both_ waited, but she couldn't think of anything to say and he was silent, too.

After a moment, he got to his feet and padded to bathroom. Light spilled into the room behind her, too quick and sharp for her eyes too adjust, not bright enough so she had to see her reflection in the window before he closed the door and the light was gone.

She didn't need to look to map his movement behind her. Flush of the toilet, then another flare of light, the click of a switch and back into darkness, bare feet on the carpet. He opened the minibar, but unlike her, he seemed to actually look at what he was taking. The minibar was closed and after another moment, she heard the faint hiss of an uncapped bottle.

Despite herself, despite not moving her head, she had slanted her eyes downward, enough to bring him into her peripheral vision as he returned to the bed. Nothing more than a dark shadow with indistinct movements.

For some reason, she felt relieved, as if she had been afraid he'd approach her.

They sat and drank in silence, but it was a heavy thing, this silence, growing and spreading until it filled the entire room. It made her throat constrict, still looking for the words, any words really, something to make the silence go away. She shifted in her seat, clutched her bottle.

It had become impossible to concentrate on the city lights outside.

Another man would have cleared his throat before he spoke, he would have at least acknowledged he shared her discomfort in some way, but Aiden just said, "Are you alright?"

"Why do you keep asking me that?"

"You don't seem alright."

She heard him move again, but she couldn't tell what he was doing.

"Do you want me to leave?" he asked and she realised she hadn't said anything more. There was no reason why he _shouldn't_ think she was hurt, that _he_ had hurt her and perhaps he'd been afraid he'd do exactly that when he'd tried to push her away in the very beginning.

"No," she said, because she knew if she said nothing, he would take it as confirmation of his worst assumptions. She didn't like the thought, it would be a disappointing end to an extraordinary evening and night. It would give all the faceless men in the Infinite 92 too much power. It would mean Lucky Quinn and Iraq's meddling could reach her even from beyond the grave.

"No, stay," she said again, just in case he hadn't believed her the first time.

He moved again and she hoped it was to settle himself back on the bed. The sheets rustled again. For the second time that night, she was surprised at her own relief.

She put her bottle to her mouth, but stopped herself at the last minute. She laughed a little, put her head back and let her eyes fall closed momentarily.

"I should have checked the bottles," she said. "What are you having?"

"Some craft's beer."

She finally gave up, she had enough of this brooding, enough of this bad alcohol and this self-imposed exile from the bed. Her legs had cramped under her and she felt stiff as she got up, put the bottle away. With her back to the window, the bed and Aiden's shape was the same uniform dark it had been before. It didn't seem so empty, though, now that he was awake in it.

He started to scoot away as she leaned over the bed, but she reached for him in the dark, blindly but fast enough to catch his shoulder and he stilled. She settled her knee on the bed, felt the mattress dip under her weight. She traced her way up from his shoulder until she held his head, gripping his hair maybe a little harder than necessary.

She found his mouth again, kissed him slowly and tasted the beer on his tongue. She pulled back, swiped her tongue over his parted lips.

"Not bad," she said, thoughtfully. "For beer."

"No one appreciates the finer things," he said, sadly mocking. She was glad he followed her lead, let the moment go before she lost herself in it.

Taking another, steadying breath, trying to get rid of the last traces, she settled on the bed, close enough to feel the warmth of his body. She made a little purring sound when he slowly stroked his way down her flank, just the fingertips, following the curve of her body.

She said, "Turn on the lights."

There was hesitation, almost imperceptible, but she could sense it. He took too long before he rolled to his back and stretched out over the bed, reaching for the switch by the nightstand. She narrowed her eyes in anticipation of the glare, but the lamps by the bed only shed a soft, golden light. It barely stung and it didn't blind her. Indeed, with the lights on, all her dark thoughts seemed banished, or at least pushed back to the sidelines and out into the cold. She could deal with them some other time.

There was an old tattoo on the side of his torso, something blue and red, but too faded to make out its motif, drawn out along the muscles there, shifting with the regularity of his breathing.

She could feel the wicked expression as it plastered itself over her face. She felt it and she didn't mind, because if she had to distract herself, she couldn't think of a better way. Pushing herself back up from where she'd been about to lie down, she flung her leg over him and levered herself up, riding up over his hips and tensing her thighs before he could get any ideas about reversing the position.

A part of the silky blanket, halfway wrapped around him and still not completely loose, had managed to get caught between them. She'd take care of that in a minute, but for the now, the thin barrier was oddly enticing, touch that wasn't _quite_ as good as it was going to be.

"I know, I know," she laughed, settled back, shifting her weight until their bodies aligned. "You like being on top."

"Preference, not principle," Aiden said. One of his arms was still hanging over the edge, from where he'd switched on the lights. He tucked it under his neck as he spoke, smugly comfortable. She began to rock back and forth, a slow grind of her hips.

"And I can't argue with the view," he added, voice falling into something breathier at the end. He kept his gaze fixed on her face, almost in defiance of his words, only when she laughed again did he trail it down her body and the weight of that gaze felt almost like an actual touch.

She raked her hands down his chest and he arched into it, the muscles in his stomach twitched and she felt him tense between her thighs. She kept grinding down, but slipped her hands over her own body, getting lost in her own motion. Heat prickled down her body, pooled low between her legs, slowly soaking the sheet between them.

She didn't realise she had closed her eyes until she opened them again. Aiden's gaze was still rapt on her, but he seemed content to just watch her perform, even if his arousal was unmistakable.

"Enjoying yourself?" she asked grinning, leaned over him and flexed the muscles in her legs.

"What's it feel like?" he asked back.

She arched her eyebrows at him, riding higher and sliding her hands down her body, over her breasts and between her legs, gasping for breath as she began stroking herself.

He had more control than she had expected, more than what his body under her was telling her, but there was fever in his eyes, sizzling at the back of his gaze. For all her teasing, he managed to get her by surprise anyway, pushed himself up on his elbows and sat up. He yanked the damn sheet away and the shock of damp on solid skin tore a whimper from her throat. From him, too, but he turned it into a hungry laugh. He reached between them, stroked her, his dry thumb burned before he gathered some of her wetness.

"If you don't…" she groaned.

"If I don't _what?_ " he asked, face pressed to the side of her neck, giving little licks down her chest. She felt him grinning against her skin. He didn't stop and she rocked her hips back against him, moaning, _"Fuck."_

Aiden chuckled. "Yeah, that's the idea. Where's your bag, I'm out."

Her rather mindless rocking stuttered to a slow halt, puzzled, she looked at him until it finally clicked in her mind. "Do we have to do the sing and dance routine every time? I take the pill, and I got through a dozen checkups after… you know. You can probably check my medical records or something. So…"

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure, it's on _you_ now."

Holding on to her waist with one arm, he kept her steady as he sat up fully and folded his legs under him.

"I'm not reading your medical records," he muttered. "And you've got nothing to worry about. C'mere."

It felt different from before, for many reasons other than a missing piece of rubber. Slower and closer, wrapped around each other and finding a new, matching rhythm. She shifted her hips while Aiden ground up into her until the angle was good and then the angle was _perfect_ , spilling a moan from her lips and then tipped it into a cry.

* * *

She woke alone. She couldn't remember falling asleep but there she was. Chasing memories, she remembered Aiden's broad back pressed against her own, his steady breathing and his radiating heat. Solid and reliable to her as her mind struggled awake by slow increment.

It was strange that this should be her first thought, the thing she remembered most about that night, but perhaps it made sense. She'd been on her own for a very long time and lovers, no matter how good, they were transitory. But trust and faith, those were the rarer commodities and the more dangerous concepts.

She was sprawled on the wide bed, the sheets thankfully dry again, but tangled hopelessly throughout the night, still keeping her tied down.

When she finally sat up and surveyed the room, she spotted her clothes draped with some care over the back of the armchair by the window, where she'd sat in the night. Her phone was on her nightstand and a little letter symbol blinked patiently, begging demurely for her attention.

 

**To:** Donna Dean

**From:** AP

**Message:** Didn't want to wake you, had to take care of a few things. Hotel is paid up till tomorrow, take your time.

 

**To:** Donna Dean

**From:** AP

**Message:** Call me.

 

The first message vanished as soon as she switched away from it. The second one stayed, however.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Remark #1:** Just for the record, when Aiden implies he respects Donna's privacy ('not reading your medical records'), I feel like… weeeell, this is the same guy who keeps a camera in his sister's bedroom and then there is the entire shower-camera-thing in Dark Clouds. It's also the same guy who watches random people through their webcams just because he can… so, Aiden respecting your privacy is really worth shit.
> 
> **Remark #2:** _I've done this before,_ Aiden says and… Aiden, as your designated author for the evening, I've watched you play hard to get for three solid chapters and I've seen two minor cop-outs in Dogtown and let me tell you, _I was beginning to have my doubts about that._
> 
> **Author's Note:** Shit, I need a drink. Can I go back into my comfort zone now? Please?
> 
> * * *
> 
> **Revised on 05/June/2015 and 11/May/2017**


	6. _Nightcall No 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nightcall call chapters are numbered to echo the way audio logs in-game. They aren't meant to be the sum total of phone conversations between Aiden and Donna.

"The hard question, Aiden. Will you ever answer?"

_"What was the question again?"_

"I don't believe for a second you don't remember."

_"I don't know what you want me to say, Donna. It's complicated. I'm not used to explaining myself."_

"That actually _wasn't_ the question. I asked you what keeps you going. I still don't know. I've seen so much speculation on the news and online. I hear what the people at CPD talk about. It's all contradictory. It doesn't make sense."

_"You know me better than any of them."_

"No. Yes. But it's…"

_"Complicated?"_

"Why do you do what you do?"

_"How would I even stop?"_

"In the words of an addict."

_"In a way. I've thrown my life away a long time ago. I can't go back. I've put myself in a place where I'll forever be hunted. I'd have to run long and far to find peace and I wouldn't even know what to do with it, if I did."_

"What do you want?"

_"Nothing."_

"Liar."

_"Sometimes a better one than other times, apparently. I want… I want people to be decent to each other. I want cooperations to be honest and governments to remember who they're supposed to serve. I want the world tomorrow to be a better place than it is today. But I know that what I want and what I do don't always fit together."_

"You try."

_"You told me trying to make a difference and actually changing something for the better isn't the same thing. Do you really think I don't know the names of all the people whose life I've ruined? How many people I've killed at this point? I know, because ctOS remembers them all. Most of them deserved it, but what about their families? What about the innocents caught in the crossfire?"_

"If you really thought that, you'd stop."

 _"If I had any kind of integrity. I care, you know that, but maybe I don't care_ enough. _I'm not the solution and I'm not the hero, either."_

"You're still one of the good ones."

_"That's what you said about Iraq."_

"Do you keep a record of everything I ever said to you?"

_"Not like that, I simply pay attention. Iraq was a madman. I am… what I am. It's possible you're a terrible judge of character."_

"I guess it's good I know how to take a joke."

_"Donna… I don't have the answer you want."_

"What I want isn't important, I'm not the mark in a con. At least I hope I'm not…"

_"You aren't."_

"… so let me tell you something else about Iraq: Only madmen deal in certainties. You don't."

_"I deal in certainties all the time. Just not this one. And even this… It's just talk and talk is cheap."_

"Aiden…"

_"Donna, I know it sounds like a cop-out, but I have to hang up and take care of something. We'll talk."_

"Soon."

_"Soon."_


	7. _Nightcall: Confirmation Bias

[takes place in spring 2015]

* * *

"Aiden? Can I ask you something?"

_"Sure, anything."_

"I saw a doctor today and, well, it seems the tracking device can't be removed. Its particles are too small, they've migrated from the colour in the skin to the spine. Trying to remove them would risk doing severe damage and there's almost no way to get them all. Makes sense, in a way, from a business point of view. Make it impossible to remove, even if a girl gets away. My boss wants me to check in with Blume. They're the experts on these things, but can I really trust them?"

_"Believe it or not, but most of Blume's employees are normal people, just doing their job."_

"Yes, maybe. But do you have any idea what that tracker means to me? It's the leash I could never slip, no matter what I did, no matter how clever or fast I was, I was never going to get away from the Club as long as that thing was still live. I want it _gone!_ Hack it out with a kitchen knife if I have to _._ "

_"I'd rather you didn't."_

"I know it's gut response and I'm telling myself to do the smart thing and keep it there. But if it's gonna stay, I want to be absolutely sure it won't do anything anymore."

_"It's Blume's area of expertise. Let them do the job and I can check up on it."_

"Can you guarantee me that you'll spot everything they could do?"

_"If you want a real expert, I've got one. Knows Blume better than they do themselves, but I need to get a hold of him first. All right, I can take a look at it. Can't promise you more than that before I know what I'm looking at. I'll text you an address and you come by. Is that okay?"_

"Yes, thanks. Can I come by right now?"

_"Yeah, I'm here all day."_

"All day? Shouldn't you be roaming the streets?"

_"Roaming cyberspace."_

"More than one way to take down your enemies, is there?"

_"Staying ahead in an arms race."_

"Am I disturbing you?"

_"Not at all."_

* * *

Aiden had turned around in his chair after buzzing Donna in and now watched her as she picked her away across the airy living room.

Donna walked into his apartment like an oversized cat, cautious yet curious. Casual poise, so deeply ingrained, so much part of her, like she didn't even care she had it. He kept looking at her while she took in the room, sharp eyes scanning the high ceiling and wide space, the way she drank in the admittedly gorgeous view of the lake through the windows.

When her gaze finally settled on him, she smirked. "Do you realise you've got a porter downstairs?"

"Yeah, I noticed the guy hanging around a lot, now it makes sense."

She dropped her handbag on the sofa, leaned her hip against its side. She said, "Isn't that dangerous? He could record all your comings and goings. What if he recognises you?"

"Well, firstly, he's never seen me, there's an elevator from the garage right to this floor and secondly, in the event that he decides something's fishy with Mr. Ralph Kelley, business headhunter, I've got enough dirt on him to ruin his life and career ten times over."

She arched her eyebrows, but didn't comment further. Instead she slipped out of her jacket and dropped it over her bag before she finally walked over to him with a smile on her face. It stayed there quite firmly as she bent forward to kiss him, supporting herself with a hand on his shoulder.

Aiden pulled back from her before their lips met, a frown tightened the muscles of his face. Something had been off, but he hadn't been able to identify it across the room and through a layer of perfectly applied makeup. This close, however, the bruise around one eye and on her cheekbone was too obvious to miss. It must be a few days old, swelling already very faint.

He put two fingers to the side of her chin and turned her head, ignoring the grimace she pulled.

"What happened?"

"Got this pimp in the station," she explained. She stayed for a moment, but then straightened away from him and returned the few steps to the sofa, leaning on its side and crossing her arms over her chest. "He's running teenaged girls, but his partner got them stashed away when he was arrested. Pimp wouldn't talk to the cops."

"So they hung you out for bait?"

"No," she corrected, more bite than he thought was necessary. "I _volunteered_. It worked, we found the girls. He just didn't like me very much."

"Your colleagues shouldn't have let it happen."

"No one was letting anything happen, it's my job and sometimes it gets a bit rough. You probably had your share of black eyes."

It took him a moment to let go of the anger in his throat and find some imitation of a smile. "More than I'd like," he said. "I hope you hit back."

It was Donna's turn to take her moment, obviously considering her answer. He didn't know what he expected, but what he _got_ was one of her hands fisting into his hair and tipping his head back and giving him a real kiss, all hot lips and sliding tongue, clearly determined not to stop until she'd sucked all the breath from him.

When she pulled back, she grinned, "I always give as good as I get."

"I can tell."

He leaned his head into her hand, but then gave his chair a little shove so it rotated away from her. "Let's look at that tracking device."

It was easy to pick up the signal. He hadn't had time to do anything properly to it and it must have a self-repair component, because it had undone his scrambling signal and the tracking devise was working at full strength. He was about to tell her as much, but then decided against it. The devise was making her uncomfortable enough as it was. Besides, he was going to turn it off, anyway. No reason to disturb her.

Lacking a chair, Donna had sat down on the desk at his side, leaning forward to watch the data spool down on his central monitor. Her legs swung back and forth, but she was otherwise still, attention entirely captured. A thin, worried line had formed between her eyes. Watching her from the corner of his eyes, he could tell she wanted to ask questions, but didn't want to interrupt.

The signal strength itself was more limited than he had expected. On its own, it might cover a housing block, no more, not a very effective cage on its own.

Nevertheless, it was a cunning piece of nano-tech. Not _one_ sender, but several dozen of them, networked together to achieve both computing power and signal strength. Their migration within the body probably wasn't intentional, though he was no expert on such things, he was fairly sure the separate pieces would eventually be too far apart to maintain their function.

He didn't tell her _that,_ either, because he had absolutely no idea how to predict the span it would take. Longer than she'd like, however, which was an easy guess to make.

Cracking the devise's code was going to be a whole lot harder than that. It looked like Blume work, but nothing he'd ever seen before. Had Quinn really had the pull to make them hand over something this sophisticated? Just so he could keep track of the meat in his slave trade?

"Well?" Donna asked. "You've been staring at it for five minutes without doing anything. Something wrong?" She frowned again. "More wrong," she corrected with a slight grimace. She rubbed her hand over the tattoo as she spoke, then flexed her neck and took her hand away when she noticed.

"I was thinking," he said, looked away from the monitor to focus on her. "It's definitely Blume work, I recognise some of it. And the tracker is pretty clever, it latches onto a cellphone signal if it can find one to expand its own transmission range. It defaults to ctOS, but it can use pretty much any carrier."

She tensed, trying to keep her bearing and appear unaffected when she was obviously anything but. She looked back at the code, dug her gaze into it as if she hoped making the screen implode would help her.

"Can you turn it off?"

"Yes… I think."

He knew perfectly well it wasn't what she wanted to hear, or what she _needed_. The look she gave him was a mixture of accusation and disappointment, her imagination already working overdrive, trying to figure out how to tackle life with the tracking devise inside her body.

"You _think_?"

"It doesn't have an off switch. I'd have to write it myself and patch it in with the original programme code, like a virus." He considered for a moment. "It's going to take a while and I'll need you to stick around. I can run some baseline tests on a simulation, but in the end, I still need you here to implement it and make it work. If you have time…"

Her expression hardened. "Do it right now," she said. She slipped from the desk. "I'll just call in sick. It's not far from the truth."

She went over to the sofa, fished her phone from her bag.

He turned back to the screen, listened with one ear to the call she made. If he was entirely honest, it was a source of private amusement to know she spent her days working with the very same people — or near enough — who would give their right arm to bring him down. That her life straddled some dangerous contradictions didn't seem to have occurred to her yet.

"You can turn on some music if you like, it won't disturb me."

Meanwhile, he put most of his running operations on halt. He was likely to need whatever computing power he could squeeze out of his system, just for the analysis of the code alone. The only thing he left running were his immediate security measures, the surveillance feed from the high-rise's lobby and garage, the access to the elevator and the search he had on the police database.

He sent a message to T-Bone, just in case he needed his input. He didn't know where T-Bone was or what he was up to, but he got a response almost immediately. _Hit me,_ the message said.

Behind him, Donna was finished with her call. He sensed her stand there, unsure of what to do now. He listened for her, paying the code only some cursory attention. He heard her kick off her shoes and heard her pad bare-feeted over the wooden floor. After a moment, she turned on the radio, flipping through the channels rapidly, then back into silence.

She elected instead to find her way to the kitchen, somehow managed not to complain about the fact that he subsisted on energy drinks, beer and delivery service. She found what she needed to make coffee, though, and dropped a steaming cup off by his side without comment, but with a lingering look over the data on his monitors.

* * *

Dissembling the programme code working at the heart of the tracking devise took the better part of the afternoon. He'd originally thought it would be fairly easy to just introduce an error in the code, cause it to shut down on its own, but it turned out, the self-repair inevitably always kicked in. The best he seemed to be able to do was get it to shut off temporarily. Several weeks, according to the simulation, but after that, the tracker would be back and doing what it was meant to do.

He'd considered attacking it on the ctOS end of things, make ctOS reject the signal and at least prevent the tracker from using it as carrier, but it'd leave the tracker itself in working order. Not exactly what Donna wanted, but better than nothing.

Together, it was more of a hot-fix than an actual solution.

Maybe T-Bone could come up with something better in time.

The last problem that presented itself was to get the new code to implement at all. The tracking devise was a sender, never meant to receive any data at all. It just constantly phoned home any opportunity it got. There was no need for updates while the self-repair worked and no business reason why it would need to receive any other input. After a few attempts, he finally got one of his wifi bugs to play nice with the tracker.

It had grown dark by then, though a slim glimmer of silver still hovered on the horizon over the lake, a seam splitting apart between pitch-black water and a quickly overclouding sky.

The only light came from the monitors, the apartment was left in darkness otherwise. He swivelled his chair, got up and took his phone from its place on the desk, stood still until his eyes had adjusted and he could make out the bulk of the sofa at he centre of the room.

Donna was asleep, stretched out with her skirt riding up her thighs and drawing his gaze for a moment, white light from the monitors reflecting off her skin. He stepped back from her, afraid his hovering over her would wake her.

Carefully, he sat down on the edge of the sofa by her feet, far enough away the dip of the sofa was minor.

It was so easy to forget how young she was. Too young to have been through what she'd already survived. He had no right to put her through more of it, no matter if she wanted to help or not. He'd already proven he couldn't keep the people who mattered to him save. He'd lose them in the end and if he didn't, he had to drive them away for their own sakes.

She deserved so much better than what he had to offer. But what if it really was what she wanted? If it was not just some inferior compromise she was willing to make? He didn't have the right to decide over her life, did he?

He couldn't claim he understood her, or her motivation, how her experience would have shaped or skewed it. It wasn't his place to judge her for the mistakes she'd made and the scars the consequences of those mistakes had left her with. _He_ least of all, except he'd never had to pay anything himself, he'd always been the lucky one. He was still alive, still in one piece, still _sane_.

Pushing her away hadn't worked, she had simply refused to accept it. He could have cut her off completely, but somehow, he never had. Perhaps he was just being selfish, after all, just base animal reasoning, an instinct to take everything he could in case the moment never came again.

He reached out with one hand and stroked down her leg with the back of his hand, barely a touch, but enough to feel the warmth of her skin. Her breathing stayed even, too fast asleep to wake. He stroked her again, until he got a slight twitch and she began to stir. Leaning over her, he place a kiss on the side of her knee as she tensed her muscles and stretched, rolling to her back and pushing herself up to her elbows.

"Watching me sleep?" she inquired.

"Recording for later."

He held up the phone in his hand.

"I thought maybe you'd want to do the honours?"

"It's done?" she asked. Sleep had left a layer of roughness over her voice, but the drowsiness passed immediately. She sat up completely and snatched the phone from his hand.

"Mostly. It'll turn off the tracking devise, but not permanently. It'll hold for a few weeks, by then, I should've something better."

She flicked her thumb over the screen and the phone lit up.

"Do I have to do anything else?"

"No, you're within range."

She sucked in a harsh breath and held it, stared at him from wide eyes. He could feel her tension, transmitted through the leather of the couch, like she was going to snap if she held on to it any longer. He almost took the phone back, pressed the button himself, just so it would be over and she was released.

She clenched her teeth, looked back at the button and put her thumb over it. Aiden could see the upload screen briefly flare up, the progress bar filled, then closed itself again. Part of the trick had been to get his malicious code into the tracker before the self-repair could kick in, but the wifi bug was fast enough.

He saw the screen flicker back to its normal interface.

Donna let out the breath she'd been holding, let her eyes fall closed.

He leaned into couch, surprised himself at how relieved he felt. There'd been a chance the upload failed, for any number of reasons, but the phone hadn't reported any errors, so it should be fine. He could check if the tracker really wasn't transmitting, but things were looking good so far.

"Thank you," she said.

It was too dark to see her clearly, the cruel white light from the monitors outlined her against the dark leather. She pushed her shoulders back, relaxing, but she kept her gaze fixed on him.

There was laughter in her voice when she said, "Are you going to invite me to stay the night?" she asked and despite the levity, there was something darker underneath that pinned him in place instead of reaching for her like he wanted to.

With the life he lead, nothing between them would ever be easy, or obvious, or straightforward. At every turn, he'd have to make sure no one tailed her, he'd have to make sure no one was after _him,_ for fear of losing her in the crossfire. It wasn't a question of _was he going to_ — because he was — but the real question was _could he afford to_ or did he have to be elsewhere later tonight, in some kind of danger. Only he could dictate how and when they could be together, because if he didn't, it would leave too many angles uncovered.

He realised he'd been silent too long, but Donna didn't seem put out, just watching him. But when he kept not saying anything, looking back at her despite the muffling veil of darkness, she moved and nudged him with her foot. She moved forward a bit more, let the phone fall to the floor.

"Absolutely," he answered belatedly.

He settled his hand against the back of her leg, tracing the supple muscles under her soft skin and sneaking upward. Donna made a purring sound, low in her throat and let her legs fall open, leaning a knee into the back of the sofa.

"I have…," Aiden started. He pulled himself up, one leg folded under him so he could lean over her, spoke between small kisses up the exposed inside of her leg. "…one… more… question… for you."

He nosed past the edge of her skirt, rubbed his cheek carefully against her thigh. "Do you want me to shave first?"

Donna chuckled, slipped herself a little lower and put a hand to the side of his face.

"Are you kidding me?" she asked. Lightly, she caressed his face. "It's just…"

The phone buzzed. Aiden let his head drop into her lap, giving a long-suffering sigh. It was momentarily difficult to remember why he should bother at all. He liked it much better where he was right now, it was warm and she smelled nice.

Donna shifted under him, fished the phone from the floor.

"T-Bone," she read.

Aiden grunted held out his hand without otherwise moving. Blindly, he switched the speaker on, kept holding the phone in the air between them.

"Yeah," he said, though it probably came out a bit muffled. "Donna's here. Say hi."

"Hi," Donna said, trying hard not to laugh.

 _"Hi,"_ T-Bone echoed through the phone, hard to say if there was irritation in his tone or not. _"Look, I think I got a solution for your little problem there. Won't be all fun, I'm afraid. You've got to take out the self-repair."_

"But I thought that wasn't possible," Aiden grumbled.

_"Nah, no such thing as impossible."_

Aiden listened to T-Bone's outline of how he thought they could circumvent the self-repair. It sounded vaguely viable, but probably required several rounds of trial and error before they got it to work. Tampering with the self-repair was hampered by its tendency to overheat the tracker, not something that should be allowed to happen inside the body, even if the particles themselves were small.

"T-Bone?" Donna said when he'd finished. "Thanks for the help. It means a lot."

"Always a pleasure," T-Bone seemed to be grinning. "Just when I think Blume's finally done every fucked up sinister shit, they pull something like this. And you can call me Ray."

"Ray it is," she said, smirking.

Aiden caught himself sighing again, resisted the urge to bury himself a bit deeper, stayed where he was instead. "Just send over what you've got," he said. "I'll see what I can add."

 _"Done,"_ T-Bone announced and a tiny chime from the computer rig confirmed it.

"I'll call you back," Aiden said, cut the connection before T-Bone got something else in edgewise.

He didn't resist when Donna picked the phone out of his hand again. He was about to scoot back, but he didn't get very far. Donna threw one leg over his shoulder, it wasn't a very good lock, but it made any drive he had of getting away vanish into thin air.

He glanced up, still couldn't see much of her face. "Didn't you want me to fix the tracker?"

"It's _off_ , isn't it?" she asked, something heavy and playful sneaking into her tone. "It's not doing anything right now. It feels good like this, good enough. You said it'll be weeks."

"Yeah."

"There's time. You can finish what you started _here_ first."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Revised on 05/June/2015 and 10/May/2017**


	8. _Nightcall: Running with Scissors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aiden's mask is now a scarf, though it looks more like a neck gaiter in the game. Maybe it was laundry day. (And I've always really thought of it as a scarf…)  
> The gay rumour was supposed to feature in State of Play, but it didn't make much sense there.  
> I feel compelled to classify this as 'crack', if only because it's probably by far the silliest of all Brilliancy stories. I almost didn't include it in the lineup.
> 
> **Auxiliary Information:** Despite it existing in the background of many of Brilliancy's stories, I've somehow managed to never mention Taskforce Bloodhound, the CPD guys hunting the vigilante. Talk about clever world-building…

[takes place in summer 2015]

* * *

"I was just browsing some of the 'vigilante' sites. You wouldn't believe the stuff these people write about…"

_"Actually, I do."_

"You're kidding me! You _are_ reading this? There are forums dedicated to hunting you down, detailing your crimes. They've got this running calculation how much tax dollars have been wasted on you. There are angry rants about how dangerous you are and how the government has failed… or that they're secretly behind it to push ctOS."

_"I know."_

"But do you know you've got _fans,_ too? There's a group dedicated to snapping a picture of you. They trade tips on how to circumvent your scramblers."

_"Are they working?"_

"Well, the _scramblers_ are doing their job just fine, enough blurry shots to prove it. But it should worry you that these people are actually pretty good at finding you. Better than the cops and your enemies, at least that's what it looks like to me."

_"That's because I keep an eye on the online chatter."_

_"_ They are like storm chasers. That makes you a hurricane, you know. A force of nature."

_"I'd like it better if they stayed out of danger, I can't protect everyone. And it's pretty much a waste of time to try to save someone who doesn't want to be saved."_

"It doesn't look like they see it that way."

_"Not my place to educate them."_

"Yes, but they're still tragedies in the making. There's also a group of, well, you can never be too sure on the internet, let's call them _people_ offering you shelter and 'comfort'. I air-quoted that last one, by the way, I'm sure we both know what they mean. At least they won't run into the middle of a firefight to snap a useless picture. Did you, uh, read their stories, too?"

_"I'm not sure. I don't look at everything, just whatever gets flagged by the system. There are stories?"_

"Come to think of it, it's all your own fault. You can't prance around the city, looking like you do, righting wrongs like some modern day shining knight without attracting a peculiar kind of attention. What stories? Erotic stories, Aiden, _porn_. Most are rather silly, but some of them are actually pretty good."

_"What do you mean, looking like I do? What do I look like?"_

"Well, tall, badass and the mask just makes you more mysterious. Danger is sexy. What did you think would happen?"

_"I didn't think… That's never been my point and you know it. You should stop reading this trash."_

"I was bored and it's amusing."

_"So you're reading amateur erotica about some imaginary version of me? If there's something you need, you just have to let me know."_

"Make an educated guess about what I'm doing right now."

_"The real thing is more inviting after all?"_

"Depends on how far you're willing to go, now that you ask. Why do we never role-play? It seems like a lot of fun."

_"Because if you want something different, I'll have to pretend to be an accountant."_

"Well, here's one. The damsel-in-distress being saved by the vigilante from a pack of gang-bangers..."

_"That's the best you can do?"_

"…then they screw in an alleyway."

_"Romance is dead."_

"I know just the alleyway."

_"I'll lend you the mask."_

* * *

Throughout the day, the city has baked in the heat, but with nightfall, the rain has taken them unawares, coming out of nowhere. Water is running down, drenching them both within moments. It burns in her eyes, too much to blink away and she's dropped Aiden cap somewhere she can't remember. It tastes acrid in her mouth, all the dirt and dust of the city washed from the air.

It doesn't matter, because Aiden tastes better, despite how it's the end of a long day he really tastes of old coffee and the sandwich he's had for lunch and there are traces of blood from the lip he's split in a fight she doesn't know about. But — because — he's living warmth against and inside her, pliant lips and demanding tongue and it's still a new-old feeling she can't quite grasp.

Aiden isn't one for playing games, not truly, only if he's playing against his enemies. His scarf lies wrapped tightly around her throat, heavy with water, but he's using it only to rein her in, keep her pinned between himself and the wall, roughly, just before it becomes too much. Aiden is like that, always a little too hard, too intense, never enough patience and taking just a little more than he's willing to give. But alwaysexactly what she needs, too.

Freedom, that's what this is about, all the way. Freedom to forget how to think and how to breathe, letting her body do what it wants the most. Easy to wrap her legs around his waist and fist her fingers into the soaked, clinging material of his shirt. But the move means he has to pull his other hand free from between her legs and grip her thigh instead, crushing her back into the rough wall to hold them both up.

She still can't breathe and she's losing control of the kiss, too distracted by the restraint around her throat, the feedback loop of abrasive wet layers of jeans separating them and the dull shiver of pleasure, leaving a frustrating itch she can't scratch by merely rutting against him.

Aiden tilts his head back, out of reach of her tongue, and he slides his lips along her jaw to her ear, low-voiced, breathy amusement drifting to her, "Is it still dry-humping if it's so _wet?"_

Somewhere, at the back of her head there's a clever comeback, something like _and then there's the rain,_ she can't be bothered to put it into words, not when he slips his hand back between her legs, undo the buttons of her jeans and works the wet zipper down until he can get his clever fingers back inside, through the tight fit of her jeans and the unrelenting hold of her legs around him.

She's purring, low in her throat, riding forward and up on his fingers, locking his hand into place, giving him barely any room to move, barely more than the curl of his fingers and the hungry twitching of her inner muscles along with it. And it's _good,_ just not good enough, not full enough, not enough space for the both of them to move.

She's deadlocked, caught between an unwillingness to unwrap her legs from him and the knowledge that they are getting nowhere. She's just riding his fingers — badly — and she doesn't really know what he's getting out of it at this point, other than watching the emotions roll across her face, but perhaps that's why she hears him chuckle darkly. He flexes his fingers inside her, slows the rough strokes he's managed through the constriction and leans his head closer to her, teases a kiss he doesn't deliver.

"Turn around," he says in her ear and it's like he's flipped a switch and all her nerves light up. She's surprised there aren't any sparks in the rain.

It gives her time to realise just where she is. And she's picked this place with some care, there are turns and twists until this corner of the back alley connects to some greater avenue, but it's still close enough to hear the traffic, the low-level humming of the cars, close enough to feel the weight of all those people.

It's the point, what she wanted, this thrill like the chase of their first night, when she was still trying to find herself in all of this. It's changed now, at least in all the ways that matter, but the thought of it all still makes her heart hitch in her chest. She takes her legs down, but pulls him close into a sloppy kiss to join the water still beating down on them.

It's Aiden who flicks her around, pins her hands to the rough wall and she keeps them there when his touch leaves her. The paint is crumbling from the wall, tiny shards of it dig through the thin material of her shirt, bite into the flaring nerves of her breasts at every involuntary shudder of her body.

Aiden's hands return to her, trail down her flanks and force the soaked, heavy material of her jeans down. It clings and resists, the waistband won't go down further than her knees, the jeans still covering her thighs. She arches her back, spreads her legs, but doesn't get far.

The rain beats down on her back, draws rivulets of sensation around her hips and down her thighs. She thinks it makes her skin shine in the gunmetal-grey heat of the city. She doesn't know where Aiden's touch has gone and it's just the water mapping her body, but the moment stretches and she shifts her head against the wall to catch a look at him.

Before she can, however, he's back on her. He wraps his hand around the scarf on her neck — she feels the tug and pull of it and leans into it. The water pools along her spine, slides down her body and is disturbed by Aiden's hand, climbing up her side.

She feels him behind her, between her slightly parted legs, solid hot flesh rubbing up against her, forcing her to her toes and her chest presses harder into the wall. The rough material of his jeans scratches the back of her thighs as he covers her.

Aiden leans over her, teasingly rolls his hips against her and dips his head down, lapped the water up her spine, something between kisses and bites, sinking his teeth into the skin at her neck, between the scarf and her shirt.

It's a hungry laugh in her ear.

"Say 'yes'," he demands with another pull on the scarf that brings her head back even further.

But it comes out as a hiss, catches in her constrained throat. Everything's _almost_ too much, too much sensation between the heat of the air and the sting of the rain, the abrasion of the wall and the manipulation of Aiden's hand down her side, then on her hip, yanking her harder against him.

She tries again, _"Yessss!…_ Aid— _"_ Another yank on the scarf and her voice breaks into a snarl, tired of teasing.

Her body is too tight, she can't spread her legs further than the jeans around her knees will allow. She _strains_ around him. No more teasing, the rain has finally stripped it all away, leaving nothing behind but some raw and primal instinct.

She thinks of the city around them, _feels_ it on her skin, the intrusive attention of some camera she hasn't spotted and despite everything, for a moment she wonders what the systems see of them, whether there'll be an alert of some kind.

Aiden takes his teeth from her heated skin and she imagines him letting his head drop back so the rain can beat into his face. He takes it too slow for her feverish nerves, makes her ache and claw her fingers into the crumbling plaster under her hands.

His grip on her hips was just loose enough, the bondage of her jeans is just wide enough and she cants her hips into and away from his thrusts. The pleasure turns sharp from one moment to the next, burns through her entire body. Her breath comes in gasps and moans, constricted and going hoarse.

She's lightheaded, there's nothing but a multitude of sensation. The water-soaked scarf and the coarse wall and Aiden's steely grip. Her entire body shudders, takes her over and it _doesn't stop_. Aiden rides her through it, cascading moans spilling from them both.

Aiden drops his hold on the scarf — the oxygen is a new rush and her held back moans tip into a low cry — and Aiden folds his fingers around her shoulder to give him more leverage. She's still twitching, inside out, great spasms running through her, until it's _too much_ , her thighs shake against Aiden's last deep, sensual thrusts as if he's trying to possess her.

He gives little stuttering thrusts, aftershocks abrading her sensitive nerves and she whimpers. She rubs her cheek across the rough wall as she turns her head as far as she can, enough to see him through her rain-blurred vision in the moment before he finds her mouth from the side and it's a messy kiss, still tethering on the edge of control. She's _drenched,_ utterly, water and sweat, her fluids mixed with his release running down her legs. He rolls his hips one last time, grinds her into the wall, before he draws back and she staggers, only doesn't fall because there's nowhere to go.

He releases her mouth and she leans her head back into the wall, breathing sharply, watching him from the corner of slack-lidded eyes.

"So," he asks and his smile is devastating, eyes ridiculous bright past the strands of his wet hair. "What happens next in your fantasy?"

* * *

**To:** Donna Dean

**From:** AP

**Message:** enjoy

**Attachment:** gl43intygu.lnk

* * *

"What the hell?"

_"We were filmed."_

"I can see that! I thought you scrambled this stuff!"

_"No… I scramble ctOS and I mess up Profiler's facial recognition. It's hard work keeping up with every video and picture app out there, too much to bother most of the time. The most popular cloud services will scramble the pictures for me, because my phone embeds a signal in the video, but it only works if the app's connected to Profiler. Most of them are, this one wasn't."_

"You knew?"

_"You picked the place. I just played along."_

"So now it's my fault?"

_"I'm not complaining."_

"No, I don't recall you complaining. I guess the internet is forever?"

_"Mostly, yes. Sure, I could take it down, maybe it'll last all of five minutes before it reappears somewhere else. Ten minutes, if I crash every popular video platform at the same time."_

"You… don't sound upset."

_"Really? I could try harder if you like."_

"Are your fans suitably impressed and jealous?"

_"Actually, it's more a long string of complaints about the video and sound quality and there's a trashcan in front of the interesting parts."_

"Yeah, that's a shame."

_"There's also some minor controversy about whether I'm too rough and you're actually willing."_

"It's because they can't hear me yell 'yes'… wait, is that why…? Did you _know_ there was someone there?"

_"You know, I once tried something like that, get an alert every-time someone points a phone at me."_

"What happened?"

_"What do you think? Lots of false alarms. It's useless."_

"But did you know?"

_"Well, I thought it was the point?"_

"You didn't!"

_"Crime of omission. I didn't know, but I could've checked. No harm done. Well, except that rumour that says I'm gay. Fewer people are gonna believe it now."_

"You what?"

_"You have no idea how much that messes up the profiles, there's almost no comparable data. And it keeps you off the radar, too."_

"Yes, maybe it did, until my face was on video with you."

_"Don't think I'm not doing anything about it, but just deleting it won't cut it."_

"What _are_ you doing?"

_"Well, some very reliable sources will soon debunk it. It'll make the news and they'll interview the slightly embarrassed guy who's really in the video and not at all the vigilante. Apparently, he was out role-playing with his girl. They both will yield false positives when put through Profiler."_

"That… could actually work."

_"It won't fool everyone, but it'll kick up enough dust. You'd better practice your confused and scandalised face, Bloodhound_ will _come and talk to you."_

"I've been waiting for that one anyway."

_"Remember to keep things simple, it's easy for elaborate lies to trip you up."_

"Don't worry, I got it. Did you make up all that on the fly?"

_"I have a handful of backup plans. They_ are _meant to keep me from facing a life sentence, not a charge for public indecency, but… I think it's worth it."_

"Is that so?"

_"That is so. Look, there is one more thing. I'm sending an app to you. Let it run as soon as you can. It's going to purge me from your phone, Bloodhound won't be able to reconstruct anything useful."_

"Will do."

_"Now… Is there some other itch you need scratching?"_

"Do you know just how tempting you are? You should come with a warning."

_"I believe I do. It's not my fault you didn't pay attention."_

"Oh, I was paying attention. I just don't I care."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Revised on 05/June/2015 and 10/May/2017**


	9. _Nightcall: Riptide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a side of Aiden Pearce Donna doesn't really know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reason I gave you 'Running with Scissors' and its comparative light-heartedness is, well, the honeymoon is _over._
> 
>  **Story Notes:** I'm altering a few scenes from Dark Clouds to make space for Donna, but I think it's a fairly minor change and just something I wanted to do. This kicks off right after Aiden's patched up by Morrsky.
> 
> I _think_ Dark Cloud's supposed to take place immediately after Bad Blood and is meant to segue into Watch Dogs 2. For Brilliancy, I've dated it to autumn/winter 2015 (several months after Running with Scissors, which takes place in summer.)

[takes place in late 2015]

* * *

Donna had parked the car across the street, like Aiden's text had told her to. She waited with badly concealed impatience, fingers clenching and unclenching on the wheel. Down the street, a lamp kept flickering, setting her nerves on edge. Aiden had been monosyllabic in his text, just asked her to come. He had offered no explanation. He hadn't asked her to, either, but she'd elected to take her gun with her anyway.

She was a good shot, it was Iraq who had shown her how to use a gun and the memory of him was strangely mellow now. She could barely summon much anger towards him anymore. He'd fucked up her life, but unlike him, she was still there, still alive. She had won.

The gun helped only a little.

She scanned the street, picked out the ctOS cameras as they surveilled the empty street, but she still startled when Aiden stepped out of the darkness of an alleyway. He stopped briefly, then crossed the street, stepped around the car and got in the passenger seat.

The lamp came on, cast its murky light into the car, crawled across Aiden's face and tense body.

There was blood. Aiden had got most of it out of his hair, but he must have bled like a pig all over the collar of his coat and into the sweater beneath. More blood had seeped through the bandage on his head, but it seemed to have stopped. He looked pale and tired, his face a slowly cracking stone mask, gaze cast down on his phone, watching some video feed Donna couldn't make sense of from this angle.

He barely acknowledged her for a full minute, when he looked up, his expression didn't change. This was the look he had reserved for his enemies, frosty and penetrating. You could break yourself on that gaze, pleading for mercy.

Donna looked back at him, steadily, waited for the moment to pass.

He blinked, let those eyes fall closed and leaned his shoulders into the seat.

"Where do we need to go?" she asked.

Aiden exhaled slowly. He brought his phone up, tapped something and the GPS in the car changed its destination. Something a good twenty minutes away, by the device's estimate.

She started the car, drove it along the path the GPS dictated her, trying hard not to glance at him every opportunity she got, at every traffic light or stop sign. She wanted to know what had happened, but it didn't seem like the moment to ask. He'd lowered the phone, sunk even deeper in his seat. He was rubbing the temple on the uninjured side of his head, then moved down to massage his neck.

The GPS led into a rundown neighbourhood. It had once been nice, Donna could tell even in the darkness, working class families fulfilling their dream of their own house, but since then, several bouts of financial crises had swept through the place and the gangs had moved in their wake. They passed some groups of them, roaming their neighbourhood like packs of wolves.

She turned into a overgrown driveway, she missed the move Aiden made on his phone, but the garage door opened on its own under the glare of the headlights, chattering metal uncomfortably loud in the night.

She drove in, stopped the car and killed the engine.

"Can you close the garden gate?" Aiden asked. He opened his door and pulled himself out, his movements were slow and heavy, but it was only a momentary lapse. Donna saw him tense again, square his shoulders before he slammed the car's door closed with slightly more force than necessary. "Use only the door from the garage," he said. "Others are rigged."

He didn't wait for her answer, but walked to the door, already peeling off the blood-crusted coat as he went.

She was fairly sure the garage door was also rigged, but he probably had diffused it with his phone, the same swift motion that had opened the garage door for them.

She went outside, crossed the driveway and closed the gate. She lingered, stared up and down the street, spotted a group of gang-bangers, but they weren't paying her or the house at her back any attention.

Aiden had safe-houses everywhere in the city, small bolt-holes and entire apartments, like the posh place he kept in Mad Mile. She had been to barely a handful of them and this house was new to her.

The inside of the house was thinly furnished, a rickety kitchen table with two mismatched chairs, a low hanging lamp shedding sickly yellow light. A kitchenette was behind it, from the 1980s and apparently never properly cleaned since then. There was a threadbare couch against the other wall, hidden in shadows.

A desk stood beside the couch, packed with a computer rig, though much smaller than Aiden's usual setup, just one monitor and a laptop backed by several stacked towers.

Aiden's coat lay on the floor by the door, she picked it up as she walked past, felt the stiffness where the blood had caked to it. A little further in, he'd dropped his sweater. She picked that up, too as she walked to the kitchenette and hung both over the back of a chair. The leather of Aiden's gun holster curled on the table, but it had been dropped with the same carelessness as the clothes.

The hissing of water from the sink was the only sound, Aiden stood bent over the counter, wiped at the blood on his back and neck with what seemed to be the T-shirt he'd worn. He didn't look up when she entered, didn't seem to acknowledge her at all. A thin sheen of sweat caught the light, emphasised the hard set of his muscles down his back as he moved.

Donna looked away from him, studied the coat and vaguely wondered how difficult it was to get blood out of the leather. Not too hard, she supposed, it couldn't be the first time.

"Can you stay?" Aiden asked unexpectedly. He turned the water off, dropped the soiled shirt into the sink and watched her, seemed to really see her for the first time that night and remembered to soften his icy expression.

"Of course I can stay," she said, somewhat irritably at the implication she might refuse to be there for him.

He pushed himself away from the counter, his movements were slower, heavier than she'd ever seen him, it took real effort just to stand there, she thought, he had to force himself to do it.

He would have walked past her, but Donna snatched his hand before he could and he stopped, let himself be pulled into an embrace, though he held himself rigid in her arms. In nothing but an afterthought, he placed a quick kiss to her forehead, then stepped out of her hold.

"Thanks," he said.

She watched as he crossed the room, turned on the computer and sat down in front of it, pulling his phone from his back-pocket. He flexed his shoulders, but he didn't seem to remember how to relax. He wiped at the edge of the phone, then tapped something on it. The recording of a surveillance video appeared on the larger screen and he put the phone away.

Donna narrowed her eyes.

"What happened?" she asked quietly.

At first, she thought he wasn't going to answer at all, but then he said, "I was stupid. Took a stupid risk and paid for it. Should've known better."

Donna hesitated, as if she'd been nailed to the floorboards in that one spot. Aiden's tension had filled every corner of the room and it was seeping into her own bones. "You were shot," she observed.

Aiden sucked in a deep breath, leaned back in his chair and pointed at the screen with his chin. "Watch," he said.

So she did. She walked forward until she stood behind him. She put a hand to his back, very carefully, but when he didn't flinch or brush her off, she pressed her fingers into the knotted muscles as his neck. Her attention, however, was on the video. It showed some industrial waterfront street, badly lit in the oncoming gloom of the evening. It was easy to identify Aiden inside the bubble of pixellation surrounding him on the recording. He walked along the street with a leisurely stride and although his posture was hidden from sight, she knew he was ready to spring at the first sign of trouble. Not that it was going to do him much good.

Donna immediately spotted the van as it turned the corner behind him, but Aiden seemed to have missed it, or noticed it too late, or took too long to identify it as a threat at all. He was distracted by someone else, a man just barely visible on the edge of the screen, ten paces away from Aiden and looking back at him.

The silence of the video was eerie, made the scene as it played out surreal and far more frightening, despite the assurance that he was _not_ dead, that he was right _there._ But the video told a different story, told of a man shot down in the street, lying there without moving and a rapidly growing puddle of blood spread out where his head had hit the concrete.

"Who's the man?" Donna asked. He hurried to Aiden's side, crouched down then pulled out his phone.

Aiden paused the video.

"Someone I haven't seen in a long time," he said. "He's been looking for me, but I don't know…"

"He set you up?"

"I don't know," Aiden said. "Doesn't make sense. He called out, he warned me. Things might not have gone down so harmlessly without him."

Donna pulled her gaze away from the screen and looked down at Aiden, still looking ready to snap, dark rings had began to form under his eyes and his skin an unhealthy pallor. He needed to lie down, rest and gather his thoughts instead of staring at that screen. But there was an angry edge in his expression, she didn't have a name for. It wasn't just that he was unwilling to relax and rest, she didn't think he even could.

"But _someone_ set me up," he said. "Maybe not Mick Wolfe, but someone who knew I was meeting with him. That's not a lot of people, unless someone was listening in. Either way, they'll have left traces, just need to find them."

Donna still looked down at him with a strained calm of her own, unsure what she should say, what he expected her to say or whether, in that moment, she was just convenient to let him vocalise his own thoughts.

He minimised the video, pulled up some data feed. "Can't let that go," he said and she wasn't sure if it was meant as some kind of apology for the sake of her sensibilities. "Sets a dangerous precedent."

She took a step back from him.

"You've got a concussion, that's why you asked me to stay," she said. "When you pass out, who do I call?"

"I won't pass out," he said, indignant growl in his voice, but quieter, he added. "Says 'Doc' on my phone. He'll bitch at you and demand advance payment. There's some cash in the kitchen cabinet, taped to the underside on the left. If you need more, check the power sockets in the bedroom. They're wired up, be careful."

Donna spent the better part of the night staving off her own tiredness and watching Aiden like a hawk, though she couldn't tell if he was struggling or not. He was focussed on his work, an unyielding intensity as he dug through the vast pool of knowledge ctOS amassed, unravelling whatever web was supposed to be spun around him.

It got cold as the night dragged on and she must have dozed off after all. It was a mistake to pick the couch over a chair, she thought, too comfortable despite the springs digging into her flesh. She woke because Aiden touched her shoulder and then stuffed a folded sweater into her hands before she had a chance to even sit up straight.

He himself wore some scratchy looking cardigan. Wordlessly, he zipped it only halfway up his chest, then sat back down in front of the computer. He wasn't actually doing anything, just watching he data change on his screen.

"Do you have anything to eat?"

"Tap water."

"Not even beer?" she asked in an effort to lighten the mood, but it felt like a stillbirth before she'd even finished the question.

He scowled, "Well, there's a packet of aspirin I'm _also_ not allowed to touch, so don't remind me."

He glanced over his shoulder at her. "Order something if you want. I'm not hungry."

"Maybe you should sleep," she said. She pulled the sweater on, it was one of his and too big, smelling faintly of dust, but it gave her a chance to huddle in it. She pulled her knees up against her chest.

She expected denial, some puffed up posturing which might be faked all the way through, but could just as easily be the truth of how he felt and thought.

Aiden said, "Yeah."

He gave his chair a slight shove, let his head drop down and to the side, so he could give her a sidelong glance. "You should, too. Take the bed, I'll stay here."

"Is there a reason we can't _both_ take the bed?"

For the first time, he cracked a faint smile. It made him look even more tired. "You overestimate my self-control."

"You overestimate your health," she responded, but regretted it immediately when it wiped the smile from his face as if it had never been. She could only guess why. Perhaps the reminder of his own failure, though she didn't think his ego bruised so easily. No, far more likely, it was the reminder that he was on the hunt. Someone out there was responsible, someone _else_ he could make hurt far worse than he was.

"Probably," he agreed and turned away from her again, concentrated on the screen and said nothing more.

In the unflattering glare of the screen, his face was set in stern concentration, as if the exchange between them hadn't happened and she couldn't think of a way to reverse it.

There was a side of him he was careful not to show her. Yet, tonight, he'd been too cornered — and perhaps too drained — to care. If she had to, she could understand it as a gesture of trust. He'd turned to _her_ in a moment of weakness. But if she didn't _have to,_ it was just another calculation he'd made, perhaps literally, on the run. Who, of all his acquaintances, was least likely to capitalise on his vulnerability?

She stayed on the couch, but the cold was persistent. If the house had any heating, it certainly wasn't turned on. The computer took precedence over any human comfort and Aiden didn't even seem to notice.

Eventually, she got up and walked to his side, slid a hand along his shoulders. He tensed under her fingers, but turned his head toward her and his expression seemed to have mellowed in the last hour.

"I got a few good leads," he said. "Still don't know how it all fits together."

She smiled a little. "Do you think they'll vanish if you don't stare at them constantly?"

"That's not…" he started, but didn't finish the entirely predictable line.

"That's exactly what you do," she pointed out. "And you're getting nowhere."

"It's there," he insisted. "Someone put out a hit on me. It's been almost a year since some fixer tried to cash in on the bounty. It can't be that. I don't think it's just a freelancer. This is somebody with connections and money. I'm not letting him get away with this, playing me, playing Wolfe— and I still don't know where Wolfe fits. _"_

"And all of that will still be there in a couple of hours," Donna pointed out. "Come on, we both know this place is safe. It's a bit of an eyesore, I'm afraid, but that's not _danger_."

She felt him strain under her fingers, but he said nothing, eyes still fixed on the collected data on the screen, opened windows piled on top of each other, a mess of information and somewhere within it, the name of whoever had almost got him killed today. She spotted the scans of bad photocopies, military personnel files, assessment reports of Blume staff, private email correspondences. Was there anything he couldn't access if he wanted to?

"Well," she finally said. She leaned down over him and placed a kiss on the corner of his mouth, coaxing until he at least relaxed his lips and started to respond. He drew back from her immediately as if he suspected some kind of trick.

"I'm going to bed," she said as neutrally as she could. "If you need me, you know where to find me."

The house had just one story and though the unrelenting light of the monitors didn't find its way there, it took some time until her sleepiness returned. Curled up under the sheets, she listened to the faint, occasional yapping of a keyboard, the creak of Aiden's chair. She supposed she'd hear the thud if he fell and she didn't think she could sleep deep enough to miss it.

She drifted in and out of sleep until the first light of dawn pushed through the shoddy blinds and began outlining the room around her. She heard Aiden get up from the chair, heard him make a call and then she heard his slow steps as he came to the bedroom.

She rolled to her back, watched his darker shape against the doorway.

"Changed your mind?" she asked quietly.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, rubbed his forehead and tucked slightly on the bandage.

"Can't see straight," he said after a moment. He pulled off the cardigan, tossed it aside, then bent down to get rid of his boots. A low groan escaped him as he sat back up. He glanced over his shoulder at her and slowly leaned down until his head came to rest on her belly.

"Couple of hours," he said, making a concession to her andhis own body. "Something's going down, can't let it out of my sight too long."

She said nothing, afraid she would accidentally prompt him to pick himself back up despite everything. He did anyway, but only so he could take off the rest of his clothes and crawl under the blanket.

She listened to his breathing, the sigh on the edge of pain he tried to suppress. He forced himself to relax, one cramped muscle at a time and his breathing began to even out. After a little while, she rolled over to him, slung a leg and an arm over him, pinning him in place, just in case.

The alarm on his phone went off barely three hours later. There was nothing she could do to hold him back after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I read up on concussions and Aiden's lifestyle consists almost exclusively of things he isn't supposed to do with a concussion (you know, like driving, fighting and using a computer… and I gave him this penchant for — expensive — beer, just to round things up.)
> 
>  **For those of you who haven't read Dark Clouds:** Trying to shoot Aiden Pearce's head off and missing isn't a very bright idea. He got a little creative with the payback.
> 
> * * *
> 
> **Revised on 05/June/2015 and 10/May/2017**


	10. _Nightcall: Inevitable – Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The inevitable conclusion of Nightcall.

[takes place November 2015]

* * *

As a child, even as a teenager, Donna had still believed nightmares belonged to those rare, bad nights when she had a fever and couldn't sleep and her mind was working funny. When you woke, they vanished and they didn't return for months or years. They had no more substance than any other flights of fancy. They didn't _last_ and they had no power.

But then, she had spent nearly a year locked in a nightmare and she had known from the start, morning would not bring relief at all, just a new iteration of it. She'd been free of it, but the memory still sometimes reared its ugly head, though she knew how to handle it when it did.

However, there was the new nightmare haunting her days and nights, it filled all the silent moments in her head.

She made a purring sound and nuzzled closer to Aiden, her face pressed into the hollow between his shoulder blades as she aligned with him. She'd wrapped an arm around his chest from behind, tangled one leg with his to bask in the feeling of him so close.

He wasn't asleep, she knew, but he was calm and relaxed for once. No vestiges of tension running through his body, no last sinews strained in case he needed to move at a moment's notice.

It had been weeks since he'd been shot and he seemed to have recovered. His hair around the wound was still short, but the too long strands around it usually fell to cover it, even when he wasn't wearing his cap. At a guess, she suspected he had already forgotten all about it. He hadn't told her how the story had ended, but she had got fairly good at recognising his traces on the news.

She still didn't mind the blood on his hands, but she now understood the price of it. That grainy video footage of him shot down in the street, the puddle of blood growing around his head… _that_ was the new nightmare and it was too real to just hope for morning.

The apartment was safe, of course. He wouldn't let her stay if it wasn't, he wouldn't relax in her arms like he was. Still, it was easy to imagine some kind of attack. A gas grenade shot through the windows and a SWAT team right behind it. Or perhaps a group of elite mercenaries, flown in from some less peaceful corner of the world, because no one in Chicago would dare it.

How _safe_ could he make this place, in the end?

"Aiden," she said, quietly, before she even realised she had spoken at all.

"Hm?"

She breathed deeply, a little wistfully, because perhaps she could have outlasted the moment, if he had been asleep and hadn't heard her. Now, however, it was already done and she didn't know how to stop.

"I'm going to leave."

It was too quiet, she knew. There was no accompanying thunderclap, but Aiden was perceptive and awake enough to realise it. He might be an accomplished liar when he needed to be, but his body did a worse job of playing its part. The relaxation fell from him, one moment to the next.

"Leave?" he asked. Some sleep still clung to his voice, rendered it oddly gentle. He'd turned his head, but otherwise hadn't moved.

If she could, she'd slip even closer, but there was already no space between them anymore. She closed her eyes tighter, though, and gripped him harder.

"I can't survive like this," she said and because she had already started, she couldn't stop herself. "Do you even still remember that concussion?"

"Still get headaches," he muttered. He let his head drop back to the pillow, facing away from her.

"I told you before, I don't judge you for anything you've done, or for what you'll do in the future, but I think I finally realised what it really means. You know? At the end of the day?"

"I really don't," he said slowly.

But he did, she was sure of it. She exhaled slowly, knew he'd feel it along his spine and a minuscule shift of his shoulders betrayed it. She opened her eyes, though it was too dark to see anything other than dark grey lines on black shadows. Earlier, the moon had shone above the lake, cast silver light across the room, but it was gone now and the night was growing old.

"I can't look at you and not wonder how you're going to die," she said, as bluntly as anything she had ever said. There was nothing else, the thoughts had exhausted her days ago in her refusal to put them into words.

"And it's…" she stopped momentarily unwilling to continue. She took a deep breath, but it just made things worse. He smelled clean, none of that gunpowder residue and static she otherwise associated with him.

"It's breaking me," she finished.

"I can't promise you another outcome."

Despite herself, she had to laugh, if only a little. "You could try," she said. "Lie to me. Convince me. Tell me you can take care of yourself and no one's ever going to get the better of you. You're good at this, I've seen it. If you lied, I could lie to myself."

"That's not what you want," he said.

She could sense he was about to move, away and up and out of her hands. She held on for a moment longer and he lingered of his own, but then her grip broke. Aiden sat up on the edge of the bed, glanced over his shoulder back at her, even if he wouldn't be able to see much more than her outline.

"You've been thinking about it a lot," he said and it was too low to assume anything about what he thought.

"Since the concussion," she admitted. She didn't like what it implied, but if nothing else, she owed him this much honesty. "You know what's funny?" she asked. "I think you knew we'd get here. You tried to keep me at arm's length for a long time and I wouldn't listen."

"You converted me," he said and this time, he failed to suppress what he was feeling. She'd hurt him, of course she hadn't wanted to, but it was a weak excuse. There was nothing she could do to take it back. And besides, she had started it, she had to finish it, too.

She clenched her teeth, trying to think, but her mind didn't seem to be working, all jumbled inside her. She sat up, too, slipped backward until she could press herself against the padded headboard.

"It's like I can always smell the blood," she said. "All the time. You are always trying to protect the people close to you, you do it to me, your sister, even Ray, but you keep forgetting that we cannot protect you in turn. _I_ can't protect you."

"You don't have to protect me," he said, edge of a snarl in his voice.

"Are you sure? Because you don't do so well watching people you care about suffer. And it's exactly the same thing. You condemn me to _watch._ Helplessly. _"_

He was silent for a long time, his back still to her with only the faint outline of his profile to help interpret anything he said. Very quietly, he said, "What are you going to do now?"

"Leave," she said, back to the beginning and a part of her still wished she could make everything as if it had never happened. She could have said all of this _without_ leaving _._ She'd shot down any other outcome before it had even started. Another mistake, to complement all the others.

She wasn't sure — not now — whether she _wanted_ him to stop, even if it was an option at all, she didn't know. There was a tragedy at the heart of Aiden Pearce, something forever contradictory. She understood him well enough to finally identify it. He was a family man, he _deserved_ it, if nothing else. He rarely spoke of his sister, and he had mentioned his niece only once in all the time she'd known him. It mattered too much, she thought, for him to speak of it. He'd cut himself off from Nicole and his nephew, because he knew what would happen if he didn't. Perhaps he'd drawn the curtain on any thoughts of a family of his own long ago.

Or perhaps he hadn't, not entirely, and she had just done it for him.

"My boss," she answered. "He's offering to get me into a training programme. It'd take me away from here for a while."

"And then?"

Like a prompt, just to keep the conversation going. Donna felt like shivering, the thread was running through her fingers, frazzled. "I don't know. I can go undercover. There's a lot I can do."

"Making a difference."

She shook her head. She didn't know if he could see it. "I… I have to do this. Staying in Chicago… ."

"I get it," he said, almost impatiently. "You don't have to sell it to me." A tiny pause, a breath, something like a laugh. "Been dumped before, you know."

He finally picked himself up and walked to the cupboard without hesitation. She heard the low hiss of a drawer, the faint rustle of fabric.

"Aiden," she said and he just stopped, mid-movement, tilted his head toward her, but she had no idea what else to say. The chaos in her head was starting to settle down, leaving the taste of ashes on her tongue and the oddly belated realisation she wasn't just hurting _him_.

He turned around, faced her for the first time through the muffling veil of darkness between them, waiting for her to continue, but the words simply wouldn't come. She saw him take a deep breath, when she still said nothing, saw him close his eyes for a moment in an effort to gather himself. He shrugged, it seemed a dismissive gesture, careless, but she'd seen the force it took him to achieve it.

He stayed like that or another long minute, gave her yet another chance to say whatever else she thought she needed to say. She realised she'd have to get up, back up her words with actions. Get up and _leave,_ like she'd said she would, but she didn't want to move. She needed to leave, that much was true, but right now, the bed by her side still held a residue of heat and if she concentrated, she could still sense the pattern his touch had painted on her skin. Her nerves still tingled a little.

Finally it was Aiden who broke the spell, turned away from her and left the room, crossing in front of the windows as he did and there was just enough light reflected off all the expanse of the lake to catch a glimpse of his face, but he was past too quickly to read in it. He hadn't looked at her.

Silence flooded the room in his wake, unfeeling coolness crawled across the floor and reclaimed the bed until Donna finally gave up on it. Without turning on the light, she got up. Picked up the clothes she'd dropped without a care in the world only a handful of hours ago.

* * *

_"You called. I didn't expect that."_

"I couldn't… I didn't… It shouldn't end like that. It's not what I want."

_"Sounded like it."_

"I said I can't watch you die. Is that so hard to understand? If you're honest for once. You know the life you lead better than I do. How _else_ would it end?"

_"Donna…"_

"I could've asked you to stop. I didn't want to. I don't think you could. Whatever your life is, you picked it and I'm a coward and I'm weak because I can't handle it."

_"There is nothing cowardly or weak about you."_

"But I'm running away."

_"If that's what you've got to do…"_

"Fuck you, Aiden."

_"What do you want me to say?"_

"I call tell you're lying through your teeth from here. I'd feel better if you were angry at me. If you told me sweet lies to make me stay. Not _this._ I hurt you and I didn't think I would. And… I can't think straight. It's all too messed up in my mind and I don't even know anymore what I want. I don't want to stay with you and I don't want to leave, but leaving is what I've done, but…"

_"I can't help you there."_

"Yes, I think you can. Because I'm going away and maybe it'll be for an entire year or more, but… I can't stand the thought that it's forever. That's what I need to know. I need to leave, but… do you think I could ever come back?"

_"I'll still be here."_

"Just like that?"

_"Of course I'll still be the same man, too."_

"I haven't figured out what that means."

_"Yeah, you and me both."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is version five or six and Aiden's still being petulant, but Donna really has a rotten sense of timing.
> 
> * * *
> 
> **Revised on 10/May/2017**


	11. _Nightcall: Inevitable – Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nightcall concludes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Alternative summary:** Aiden Pearce, still screwing over people he cares about.
> 
> **Background info:** FLETC stands for Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, they are run by Homeland Securty. I made up everything else.
> 
> **Author's Note:** I'm a bit unsure of this part. I feel like it's too short, but everytime I try to write more, it just detracts. What do you think?

It wasn't an interrogation room, for however little it was worth. Instead, Donna had been sat down at one end of a conference table with the two agents on either side of her, a tablet set up in front of one of them. The two agents didn't look like they had stepped out of a movie, either. The woman, Cooper, was middle-aged and unassuming, a little overweight and dressed almost casually. She wore a mask of professionalism, hammered into her expression, giving nothing at all away.

The other was called Lamar, younger than Cooper, stocky and dressed in an ill-fitting grey suit he'd tried to spice up with a bright yellow shirt.

They had picked her right from the gym and brought her here. If Donna had asked, she was sure they'd have been able to present her with all kinds of court-orders or perhaps the meaningful suggestion that they didn't actually need a judge's permission to do whatever they pleased.

She considered asking for a lawyer and hiding it behind a joke, but she suspected it wouldn't go over well.

Cooper said, "You have no idea why you're here."

"A friendly chat, coffee and pie?" Donna asked, forced a bright smile on her face.

Cooper didn't react to it at all, not even in a hint of annoyance.

"When you applied, you signed a waiver, you gave us permission to run a very thorough background check on you. Of course we have already been informed of your past and that's not a problem in itself. You bring experience to the job some college graduate will lack. Since you'll most likely be used for undercover work, that's invaluable. But some of your more recent activities raised questions we didn't expect."

"Do you have anything _specific_ to say?" Donna asked. "Or are you just talking to fill the silence?"

She dropped the smile, it was clearly not working.

"We have several questions," Cooper said, unimpressed. "Let's start with your movement pattern. Since you live in Chicago it's fairly easy to gain a comprehensive map of where you've been in the past year, however, there are some odd discrepancies."

Cooper tapped something on the tablet, then turned it around and held it out in front of Donna.

"The GPS in your cellphone seems to cut out a lot," Cooper said.

Donna kept looking into Cooper's eyes for a long moment, before she let her gaze trail down to the tablet. She already had an idea what she was going to see, it helped a little to keep her features schooled. Whether she was good enough to fool Cooper or her silent partner was beyond her.

The tablet showed a map of Chicago with dots representing whatever anomaly Cooper had found. It wasn't a difficult guess, even before Donna identified some of the addresses marked on the map.

"Maybe the phone's just broken," Donna offered.

"Possibly," Lamar cut in. "But we'll get to your phone in a moment."

"Besides," Cooper picked up again. "Your cellphone malfunction seems to depend at least partially on location."

She tilted the tablet until she could see it, reach out and tapped a button. Most of the dots vanished, but some remained. Her own apartment and some of Aiden's safe-houses.

Donna affected a frown. "That's coincidence," she said. She pointed at the screen. "That's where I live. I heard ctOS has weird blind spots, maybe that's just it?"

"We checked that," Lamar said. "Our Blume liaison was oddly evasive on the subject of ctOS blind spot, but she was very adamant that they do not produce errors like this. Blume sent us their analysis, I'm sure it's been tampered with to hide their company's dirty secrets, but there are enough times when ctOS coverage of these areas is flawless."

"What about…" Donna shrugged helplessly. "Temporal outages?"

"They would've been logged and Blume would know about them."

Donna stared at Lamar. She didn't have any idea what to say next and she just hoped they'd interpret her silence as confused innocence.

"We looked at your cellphone," Lamar said. It was lying on table in front of him, but he wasn't looking down at it, rather focussed earnestly on Donna. "It's OS seems to have been tampered with quite expertly. We can only tell that a number of texts and phone calls has recently been deleted beyond recovery."

Donna bared her teeth. "So what? I don't get along with people sometimes, so I delete them. That's not unusual and I'm _pretty_ sure it's not illegal."

"How did you delete this information?"

Donna pulled a face, raised her eyebrows. "Some app I got off the internet, I think."

A sudden smile broke through Lamar's stern facade. He shook his head. "No, nothing off the internet does that."

"Well, it's true," Donna said.

Lamar made a low sound of disbelief. He shook his head, "We also checked out your contacts."

Donna shrugged, kept her gaze fixed on him, though she was acutely aware of Cooper's attention on the edge of her vision. She realised that the two of them probably knew how to work together. While one talked, the other was free to observe, and by switching the ball between them, they kept their target off balance.

Normally, it would raise Donna hackles, at the obvious disrespect and the unabashed manipulation. This time, from the moment she'd seen Aiden's safe-houses highlit on the map, she knew whatever they were charging her with, she was probably guilty of it. She didn't know how much they had puzzled together already, whether they'd already handed this back to Blume or Bloodhound.

If some move had already been made against Aiden, Cooper and Lamar would've mentioned it by now, wouldn't they? They seemed to be fishing, though she had the bait firmly down her throat already.

Lamar picked up her phone, tapped on it and a moment later, the dial tone from her phone's speakers filled the otherwise empty conference room.

_“Chances are you dialled this number by mistake. If so, hang up now. If you’re trying to find me, you’re not going to, so hang up now. There won’t be a beep.”_

Deftly, Lamar put the phone back down. "We tried tracking that," he said.

Donna realised she'd closed her eyes the moment the call had connected. She forced them to open again, meet Lamar's gaze steadily and keep playing her part. She'd done that for eleven months, once. Homeland Security agents were _nothing_ compared to what she'd had to face.

"And?" she prompted. She wasn't going to do their work for them.

"We couldn't," Lamar said. "But we analysed the voice and Blume's graciously given us the match. However, while the computers are very sure the voice matches one Gary Villeneuve, however, our own system is unable to verify the result."

"Do you remember him?" Cooper asked. "He enjoyed a brief moment of unintended internet fame last summer, when he and his fiancee were filmed indulging themselves in public."

"Yes, I remember," Donna glowered a little. "I had a chat with Bloodhound over that whole thing."

She leaned forward. "Look, I don't know what's going on. ctOS is buggy as hell, everyone knows that. It fucks up all the time. Nothing that comes out of that system is reliable."

"Yes, maybe," Cooper said. She pulled the tablet back to her, swiped around on it for a time. "Even though ctOS misidentified you, your cellphone seems to have been right there when Mr. Villeneuve had his little misadventure."

Donna spread out her arms. "How precise is that anyway? I was probably just walking down the street on the other side of the building, or something." She bared her teeth a little. "My virgin eyes were spared the sight, though."

Cooper lowered the tablet and Donna felt oddly exposed with the tiny barrier was suddenly taken down. Cooper pinned her with her gaze, enough to make the air between them sizzle.

"Do you know Aiden Pearce?" she asked. "Chicago's vigilante boogeyman?"

"I saw him a few times," Donna said. "He saved me. You _know_ that."

"Yes, it's in your files," she glanced down briefly. "However, that is _not_ what I was asking. Are you — or were you — in contact with him?"

"No," Donna said. It wasn't, after all, the first time she told that particular lie. She hadn't expected the way her throat closed down, however. Leaving Aiden had been one of the hardest things she'd ever done. Coming to New Mexico had helped, though not as much as she had hoped. She kept telling herself her decision was final, but if she really believed that, why would she have to repeat it all the time?

Now was the worst possible time to ponder these things. Donna pulled herself together before Cooper had a chance to interpret her sudden pensiveness.

Cooper said, "So the fact that your GPS malfunctions match up with a call to the CPD's tip-line on more than one occasion is just chance? That untraceable contact on your phone? The 'internet app' that deletes stuff so perfectly even we can't recover it? All just coincidences?"

"You'll have to prove they aren't," Donna pointed out through her teeth.

"I have one last question," Cooper said as if Donna had never challenged her at all. "The tracking devise in your neck. I understand it cannot be removed."

"No, it can't," Donna said roughly.

"You had an appointment with Blume to have it deactivated, but you cancelled it."

"Blume designed the devise for Quinn. I didn't trust them?"

Cooper glanced down on her tablet again, pretending to confirm something she clearly already knew. She looked up again. "I see, but isn't it worse, knowing the devise is still live?"

Donna frowned. At this point, she had expected practically anything. Anything _else._ The tracking devise had been safely out of her life, at least that's what she had thought.

"What do you mean?"

"We thought the tracking devise could be a security risk if you went undercover, so we checked with Blume to confirm it was non-functional. They told us you never showed up and it turns out the devise is still working. Why is that?"

Donna didn't know if Cooper had time to register the shock on her face. For the moment, Donna couldn't have cared less, either. Her hand came up of its own volition to press fingers into her neck to the border of pain. No doubt, Cooper would spot it and use it, but then the shrill noise of the fire alarm cut through the tension.

Donna startled and Cooper and Lamar exchanged a quick glance. Especially Cooper seemed displeased by the interruption, but both agents got to their feet, Cooper quickly gathering the tablet while Lamar pocketed Donna's phone.

"We're not done," Cooper said as she ushered Donna out in the hallway, where other employees of the centre were already making for the fire exits. Some seemed already panicky, others were treating it more like a welcome cigarette break and took a leisurely stroll.

Cooper and Lamar did their level best to keep Donna in their sight in the mass of people spilling into the bitter cold outside. Donna shivered in the hoodie she wore, pulled her shoulders up and tried to stick close to the wall and out of the wind.

She wasn't allowed to stay there. A firefighter appeared and gently reminded her to keep clear of the building.

Donna crossed the street to where a café was overrun by refugees. She didn't have any money on her, but she guessed no one would mind if she just stood around. At some point, she'd lost Cooper and Lamar, or at least she couldn't see them anymore.

"Uh, sorry?" a male voice said behind her and when she turned she looked into the face of a very confused teenager. He held a phone in his hand. "There's… someone who wants to talk with you… I think?"

She almost felt sorry for him and despite the utter turmoil in her head, she managed to spare him a quick smile. "Shit, sorry," she said. "I'll just be a minute."

Not like she could come up with an explanation for this, anyway. She took his phone and turned in the crowd slowly until she spotted a surveillance camera in the corner of the café. Since ctOS 2.0 had rolled out across the country, all major cities were in the network already. Here in Artesia, work was just starting on the infrastructure, but the camera was clearly already plugged in.

She put the phone to her ear and said, "Why is the tracking devise on?"

_"I turned it back on. In case there was an emergency. Listen, you should've told me you were training at FLETC. None of my smoke-screens will stand up to the kind of background check Homeland Security can run. But they can't charge you with anything, there's no solid evidence. Withdraw your application and they'll end up letting you go."_

"I don't care about that!" she snapped. She felt the teen still hovering close by and she drew a few other irate looks. "What about the tracking devise? You said it was off _._ Ray said it was off."

_"It was off. T-Bone's work is solid. I turned it back on later."_

It felt like forever until she could find anything to say, or at least until she could figure out what to say _first._ The press of people all around her left her in an odd cocoon of privacy. Everyone around her could listen in, but strangely enough, no one was. Everyone was chatting, talking about the fire, speculating about it. Only the teen whose phone she held paid her any attention at all and he seemed entirely to confused to make sense of what was going on.

"Why would you do that?"

_"For emergencies. Donna, you_ need _to fix this first. The fire's just a distraction, it won't last. I need time to find something to keep Homeland Security off your back. I can stop this from leaking back to CPD and Bloodhound, at least for now. You have to keep playing dumb until then. Lawyer up, it'll buy me time."_

"And the tracking devise?"

_"I can't turn it off remotely."_

She was still freezing from the cold, reeling from the interrogation before. Her neck was itching, but she knew nothing she could do would help. Aiden sounded honest, but if she had learned nothing else in the past hour, then it was how well he could fake it.

"Don't worry about me," she told Aiden and didn't give him time to reply. She cut the connection, smiled fleetingly at the teen and handed him the phone back.

The moment it was done, her anger had already began to turn into a slow-burning rage. She knew the ambiguity of her parting words, she knew Aiden could understand it as a threat. She didn't know if she really had enough to endanger him. The addresses of his safe-houses, but he would burn them too easily. She could testify against him, but that would require CPD to catch him first and she didn't think she could help with that.

And the truth was, she still didn't want to betray him on that scale. Lash out, perhaps, hurt him in some way, but even that seemed a petty thing. If she could, she'd walk away from all of it, from Chicago and him and her own past. Find some place far away and start over, get it right this time.

She huddled into her hoodie before she stepped back outside. Smoke was coming from several upper story windows in the building across the street. She heard someone mention that a fuse had blown and set an office on fire. She still couldn't find Lamar and Cooper among the crowd and decided to head home.

Perhaps a walk in the cold would clear her head.

* * *

_“Chances are you dialed this number by mistake. If so, hang up now. If you’re trying to find me, you’re not going to, so hang up now. There won’t be a beep.”_

"Hey, answer your phone, I'm back in Chicago and I need the tracking devise turned off for good. … Damn, Aiden, I still don't know what you were thinking. After everything I've told you about it. What it means for me? After everything? I just can't… I went to _you_ with this because I wouldn't trust anyone else. Because there was no one else I'd want to mess with something so important to me. That tracking devise, let me tell what it is. Let me tell you _again,_ because it turns out you weren't listening. That tracking devise, it's a leash. I'm not my own person while that thing is there. I don't belong to myself. I belong to Lucky or that nightclub and to anyone who pays up. And now that's you, too. Because the leash is still there and you're the one holding it. It…"

_"Donna, I…"_

"So you have been listening, that's what I thought."

_"I haven't. There was some… trouble, I couldn't answer."_

"Yeah, just so you know, Cooper is running scared, promised to drop everything. She was close to tears. Whatever you did, I doubt she deserved it. But I guess my career isn't as ruined as it could've been… Can you turn it off?"

_"I'm sorry it happened."_

"No, I don't believe you. You're just sorry I found out."

_"I'm sorry about your_ career. _You'd have been a good agent."_

"And not sorry about the tracking devise. Too little honesty, Aiden, and far too late. But maybe it's my fault, too. There's a side of you you've been very careful not to show me. Now I think all versions of you are true, what law enforcement says and the face you've been showing me and everything that scares the mob so much. I just didn't understand it before."

_"What do you blame me for?"_

"I blame you for lying. You lied to me just easily as to everyone else, but I'm sure I was an easy target."

_"You were never a 'target' of anything, Donna. I've never used the tracking devise and I disguised the signal, unless someone was specifically looking for it, they wouldn't be able to find it. The people around me are always in danger. I had to have something in case things turned bad."_

"Well, not this one. Not the tracking devise. Any danger in the world is better than that. I thought you understood. But, well, you don't have to worry about me anymore. I'm not _yours_ anymore. I shouldn't have to say it, but I've learned my lesson. The bad news is, we'll still be sharing the same city for a while. I have to wait until this blows over before I can ask for some kind of transfer. I trust the city is big enough for both of us."

_"I need my rig to turn it off. I can be home in two hours, if you want."_

"I want Ray to do it. Just Ray, not you."

_"I'll need time to arrange that."_

"I'm sure. You know what? Forget it. I'm going to Blume. They offered to do it the first time, I'm sure they'll manage."

_"You can't. That is… you shouldn't. They'll recognise T-Bone's work and you'll never get them off your back. Let him turn it off, he knows what he's doing."_

"Great. So set me up. Soon, for preference."

_"Don't worry."_

"Don't worry? Don't… I have nothing more to say to you. Get it done."

_"Donna, that's not how I wanted it."_

"…"

_"Donna?"_

* * *

**To:** Donna Dean

**From:** AP

**Message:** You can contact T-Bone directly. 555-348-8453.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel a bit bad for doing this, make no mistake. Sorry for the (uhm) inevitable heartbreak, but I had always planned to break them up in this two-fold way. 
> 
> I started and I finished with a phone conversation (or very nearly so) I count that as a win.
> 
> * * *
> 
> **Revised on 10/May/2017**

**Author's Note:**

>  **References:** 'Nightcall' like the song by Kavinsky that plays at the beginning of Drive.


End file.
